


the faithful departed

by mikapim



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood Magic, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Will, Interdimensional Travel, M/M, Mind Palace Sex, Murder, Murder Husbands, Murder as a Love Language, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Relationship Negotiation, Tags are For Entire Fic, Trust Issues, fabulism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:40:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikapim/pseuds/mikapim
Summary: It felt as if Will was experiencing a thousand moments at once- the moments familiar, but not in the way he had originally lived them. Will had been speaking mostly metaphorically when he once said he felt himself guilty of having committed Hannibal’s crimes. Feeling this kaleidoscope of experience, wherein he was the observer, the victim, and the perpetrator all at once, he believed for a moment that he actually had.***In which Hannibal dies in the fall, leaving Will alone to try to figure out what comes next. In another universe, Will dies, and Hannibal is left to wonder the same.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 8
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for the entire fic:  
> -canon typical violence and dead body mutilation  
> -not actual self-harm but some actions are definitely self-harm adjacent  
> -character death (talked about, impermanent, alternate universe death for will and hannibal. actual full on death for one other character. if you're curious before reading i will mention who in the endnotes)

Will Graham was shocked awake by the sound of a gunshot. 

He flailed as he woke, hands grasping for bedsheets and feet jerking to try to push himself upright. He faced resistance, both from the terrain- sand, not bedsheets after all- and from his own body. Seemingly every part of him was screaming. Even opening his eyes sent sharp pain through his skull. He saw darkness and blur, and then after a few moments all he could see and hear was the endless ocean ahead of him. He did scream then, uncertain if he was asleep or awake, but instead of sound, a torrential flood of blood and sea water poured out of his mouth, seemingly in unending supply. 

Once he could breathe, Will laid back against the sand again, curling in on his side so he didn’t choke. The sky was lit by a shock of lightning, and Will could briefly see more clearly the small patch of land on which he had arrived. Five counts and then thunder sounded as well. It was storming. Rain was beating down on him, and he was covered in blood, and he was alone on a beach. 

“Fuck,” Will breathed out, forcing himself to turn his head to confirm that last point. No one else was there, and he wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. 

It hadn’t been a gunshot that had woken him then, but thunder. _The storm had come quickly_ , Will thought, _it hadn’t been storming when-_

_When_ , Will realized, _when when when_. 

When he had sliced a blade through a man’s gut. 

When he had taken himself off the cliff. 

When he had taken _Hannibal_ off the cliff.

Hannibal. 

Will forced himself to sit upright again, and then to stand, every molecule of him seeming to resist the movement. He squinted hard into the darkness, looking for any sign of life.

“Hannibal,” he said, voice muffled by the blood still filling his mouth. He spit hard into the sand, and said again, louder, “Hannibal!”

Without warning, the natural noise and light of the storm was overtaken by shouting and synthetic search lights. Will barely noticed. He was walking toward the water, each step blinding him with pain. Finally he stopped, the water just up to his shins, when he saw a flash of something, someone under the water only a few feet away. 

Will was trudging toward them, desperate but slow-moving, when he was pulled back from the water. His arm felt like it was being ripped off, and he stumbled back against someone. Will fought against the grip vehemently, only barely aware of how he was still shouting Hannibal’s name, just Hannibal’s name, interspersed with grunts and choking. He was certain it was Hannibal in the water, even though he could barely see in the darkness. Will needed to get to him, he wasn’t swimming, wasn’t moving, Will needed to get him out of the water. 

Will squirmed and kicked and jerked against the form holding him back, felt his body start to give out in time with how his voice was going hoarse from shouting for Hannibal. 

It wasn’t until he had completely exhausted his throat that he finally could make out the voice shouting in his ear, familiar and exhausted. 

“He’s dead, Will!” Jack Crawford was holding him back, now holding on to both of Will’s arms with a deadly tight grip. “Will, he’s dead.”

Around them, men in all black, FBI agents masquerading as angels of death, rushed forward into the water to pull out the sunken form. It was Hannibal, completely soaked in water and blood, his clothes pulling his body back into the ocean even as an FBI agent yanked on his arms to pull him out. 

_He looks small_ , Will thought in the back of his mind, deliriously disgusted, _he looks weak._

The agents pulling Hannibal out of the water let his body hit the sand with a loud slap, and Will was hit by a second wave of need. He threw himself forward, almost but not quite escaping Jack’s grip, spitting blood as he kept on calling out Hannibal’s name. 

Hannibal’s body remained still.

Finally, Jack pulled Will back hard enough that he hit the sand. His shoulder hurt so bad his vision blurred for a moment, and once it cleared Jack was staring down at him, his expression undercut with a sliver of concern. He was looking at Will the same way Will had seen vets look at dogs they had to put down- pity and resolve entwined. 

“He’s dead, Will,” Jack said, again. 

Will found himself looking past Jack to where Hannibal’s body was being forced into a body bag. Will realized he was crying, but he didn’t know when he had begun. He only vaguely heard Jack barking orders for a medic. 

Finally wrenching his eyes from Hannibal’s body once the black bag had been zipped up and started to be drug away, Will looked off into the sea. In the dark, the sky and the water looked the same, and he tried and failed to find the horizon. 

There was, however, a glint in the dark. A small shape, far enough away that it could have been anything. It faded more and more into the distance as seconds passed. Will sensed more than detected that it was a boat, and found it growing brighter in his mind until it was all he could see. A bright light, overtaking the dark blue of the landscape. All other noise and sensation dulled.

Unable to close his eyes to the light, Will- as if he was once again in the ocean- felt himself slip under. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was over two weeks in the hospital before Will was allowed to talk to anyone who wasn’t a nurse or a doctor or a rotating armed guard stood statuesque at the door to his hospital room. He wasn’t sure if the isolation was a type of punishment manufactured by Jack, or if Will himself just wasn’t that much of a concern now that Hannibal was gone.

The latter seemed to be true, as it wasn’t even Jack who came to see him but Alana, armed with a single chrysanthemum in a small glass vase.

Will glanced at the flower, unimpressed.

“I told my son I was visiting someone in the hospital,” Alana said, fingers fidgeting against the vase before setting it down on the bedside table. “He insisted I bring it.”

Pre-defenestration Alana and post-defenestration Alana occupied such different spaces in Will’s mind he found it difficult to reckon the two of them as the same person. The Alana who appeared in front of him now was different as well, dressed more casually as she might have before but wearing the expression of someone who was intimately aware of how every second she was still alive was hard-earned. 

_This would be an all new Alana,_ Will thought, _the one who had survived Hannibal Lecter for certain. This is the Alana who wins._

“The doctors say you’re healing well,” she said, taking the seat near the bed. For the weeks Will had been here, it had remained unoccupied by anyone except for drug-induced ghosts of the dead and maimed- Abigail, Beverly, Georgia Madchen, and Chilton had all visited him in spirit, offering advice and chastisement. Never Hannibal though. He only visited Will in dreams, and even then only in forms Will could barely recognize. “Relatively well.”

“Relatively,” Will agreed, his voice hoarse from lack of use. “I’ll never be able to lift my right arm over my head again. One too many times shot or stabbed.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of physical therapy,” Alana said, her smile grim. “They said I would never walk again.”

Will didn’t respond. From the window he could see trees turning from vibrant oranges and reds to crackled brown. The first snow of the season would fall soon, and Will hoped he would be out of this room by the time it did. 

“Am I being held here against my will, Alana?”

Alana frowned. “You were barely alive when you were brought in, Will. You need medical care.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Will felt pity falling in waves off of Alana and it made him feel irritable, justified or not. “I upheld my end of the deal. It’s finished."

“The eight dead officers weren’t part of the deal,” Alana said, softly but clearly troubled.

“That was Dolarhyde,” Will said easily, and then, after a moment. “Or Hannibal.”

“You don’t remember?” Alana asked, not sounding like she believed that.

“It was whoever it needs to be,” Will said, finally looking away from the window but still not meeting her eyes. “For the official story to make sense.”

Alana’s fingers twitched against the air. She had gotten used to the cane, Will realized, used to having something in her hand. She felt its absence like a missing limb. 

“Am I being held against my will?” Will asked, again, voice clearer. 

Alana’s pity was gradually turning to discomfort. “No. You’re free to go once you’ve been off the more serious of your pain medication for 24 hours. I’m here because I offered my assistance to Jack in getting you settled.”

“Jack isn’t coming?” Will wasn’t surprised- Jack had seen more than Will would have normally allowed when he found him on the beach. Jack wouldn’t be coming to Will to ask for help hunting down serial killers anymore, lest Will team up with another one. How easily that book was able to be closed, when it had been something following Will for a half-decade.

“He can, if you want,” Alana said. “He didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

_A lie_ , Will thought. He just hummed in response, already thinking of when he would leave. 24 hours, then. He could get out of here in 24 hours. 

“Will you be going back to Florida?” Alana asked.

_That_ stopped Will’s thoughts in their tracks. Molly had been a painful but distant thought through his weeks in the hospital. She hadn’t reached out, which Will didn’t find surprising or even particularly upsetting. It _was_ upsetting to think of her, of what he had done to her and Wally through his foolhardy attempt to separate himself completely from Hannibal. He wouldn’t go back to her, and not just for the fact that that was no way in hell she would let him. Even if she could have brought herself to forgive him for what had happened with Dolarhyde, she would know at first sight of him how he had given in to the temptations he had tried to warn her he was capable of. Not her sweet man anymore. Molly Foster, with her uncanny, world-weary expression, would finally see through him to what he really was. 

Alana seemed to see it too. Will thought of Elliot Buddish, who saw sin on the face of his victims in the form of hellfire, and wondered how his own true nature was manifesting. Perhaps the scar on his cheek would give him away, now.

“Or are you going back to Wolf Trap?” Alana asked, and Will just nodded slightly in response. “Good. I can order you a car for when you’re discharged. The FBI is willing to offer you a severance package as long as you sign a confidentiality agreement.” 

“I don’t think I was even on the FBI payroll for this one,” Will said, though he wasn’t phased by the offer. Might as well let the taxpayers’ money go to keeping him quiet, like there was any reality where he would discuss with _anyone_ what happened in that damned house on the cliff. 

The press about Hannibal and Dolarhyde’s deaths, which Will had watched little of but enough to get the gist, was as perfunctory and banal as news about two serial killers fighting to the death could be. If Will was mentioned at all, he was anonymously referred to as the lone survivor in the FBI transport van. The news reports seemed conflicted on if Will had even been in the cliff house at all. Will figured online news, and TattleCrime in particular, would be significantly more theatrical, but he didn’t have a computer in the hospital, and even if he did, reading that drivel had been Hannibal’s vice, not his. One of Hannibal’s many vices.

“You must be happy,” Will said, cutting Alana off as she started to say something else surely benign. “Hannibal can’t keep his promise anymore.”

“He can’t,” Alana said slowly, questioningly. Her eyes shot to where the armed guard stood a few feet away, unmoving. “He can’t,” she repeated, “right, Will?”

That wasn’t exactly what Will had meant to imply, and while he certainly didn’t intend to hurt Alana, he wasn’t bothered that she thought he might, even if it felt hopelessly hollow in comparison to every other time he had held power over someone’s life. The only part of the conversation that even inspired a fragment of a spark of interest was the idea that Hannibal would be influencing him beyond the grave. Still, Will didn’t answer her.

“I wish I had known,” Alana said, voice now soft and hurt. “How far past saving you were.”

“What would you have done differently?” Will asked. “Would you have let Mason kill us both?”

Now Alana wasn’t the one meeting Will’s eyes. Maybe she would have. Maybe it would have even been the right thing to do. 

“I’ll leave the number for my office. Someone will be able to help you with getting a car to the house, or whatever else you need.” Someone, but not Alana. Will was certain this would be the last time he would ever see her. 

“Thank you,” he said, not entirely insincere. The same Alana who had been one of the closest things he had to a friend for years was still in there, changed as she was. Changed as they both were.

Alana just nodded, and started to leave the room. The chrysanthemum had already dropped one of its soft, thin petals.

“Goodbye, Alana.” Will said, and he finally met her eyes as she turned her head to look at him as he spoke. She looked scared. She had never looked truly scared of him before, even in the worst of it. 

In that moment, Will saw himself the way Alana was seeing him. And instead of seeing hellfire, Alana saw Hannibal.

Will slept fitfully after Alana’s visit, and the rest of the following day was spent in being prepared to leave; getting mountains of instructions and paperwork from doctors, including being forced by a particularly jovial nurse into swearing that he would keep up with the physical therapy for his shoulder. Will doubted he would end up keeping the promise.

Finally leaving the hospital was the closest he had come to feeling joy since the cliff, and even then it was more a faint shadow of relief. Even after the atrocious hour long drive from the hospital to his house, his initial reaction to being driven up the long dirt driveway was nausea. The last time he had woken up in this house, he had woken up to see Hannibal there. 

He didn’t thank the driver, just grabbed his bag of prescriptions and slowly made his way to the front door as the black SUV departed. Will hadn’t hired anyone to take care of the house once he had left like a bat out of hell so he would never have to think about Hannibal kneeling in the snow in his front yard ever again, and it showed. Some of the porch railing was rotted, about to give way. Will felt tears smart in his eyes and he jerked his head to focus on an invisible point in the skyline. The medication he was on made him oddly weepy, and he’d spent most of the past few weeks crying over nonsensical things, while being unable to even begin to process the things he was actually supposed to be mourning. Hannibal, his marriage, his own entire life. 

He took a watery breath and went inside. 

Everything was exactly as it had been left, except covered in a heavy layer of dust, pardoning a trail of footsteps leading to exactly two boxes sitting on one of the kitchen counters. Will frowned and went to them, steps faltering when he noticed an envelope between them. His name was written in messy print he immediately recognized as Molly’s. 

The envelope contained a single piece of paper, on which was written the name “Winston” and a phone number Will recognized as the number of the kennel in Fairfax he had used when needed years before.

Will cried genuinely then, shocked beyond belief at this final act of generosity from Molly. _This is what you were giving up, what you gave up,_ he thought, _you gave up this kindness for a man who isn’t even alive to give you the violence you deserve._

He pulled at his own hair hard, willing himself to get it together and look through the other boxes. They were mostly inconsequential, packed with the few things he had taken with him when he moved. He wouldn’t have minded if Molly had kept them, but then again he understood her not wanting to.

Will briefly considered calling her, but instead found himself dialing a number he had saved in his cell phone, of the law office that he and Molly had used when dealing with fine details of her first husband’s will. The office didn’t answer, to Will’s relief, and he left an awkward and halting message stating how he wasn’t sure if Molly had filed for divorce yet, but Will was willing to fill out whatever paperwork was needed, and that he wanted to start paying alimony as soon as possible. 

He felt like complete shit, physically and emotionally, by the time he’d finished leaving the message, viscerally disappointed in himself in a way he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt before. It was such a prosaic thing to feel shitty over, and Will felt almost slighted by it. He was standing in the room where he had once watched on as a man ate his own face, and here he was feeling the pedestrian guilt of a bad husband and father.

In response to his guilt, Will took a double dose of the pills they had given him for insomnia, and when he woke the next morning, he was groggy beyond belief and lying at an awkward angle on the kitchen floor. He regretted everything, immediately, and spent most of an hour groaning before using the emergency gallon of distilled water under the sink to clean himself in a mockery of a shower. 

The day that followed was, honestly, one of the most grueling of his life. The common tasks he had to complete- calling to get the water and electricity turned on, ordering groceries to be delivered, calling the kennel to see if they would bring Winston so Will didn’t have to rent a car- were made mountainous by both the pain he was in and by the fact that there was little he would rather be doing less. 

The weeks that followed were similar in degree of monotony and exhaustion. Even Winston seemed to be annoyed at him, which Will realized was actually just his being bored at there not being any other dogs around. Will almost regretted that Molly returned Winston at all, knowing the dog would have been happier staying with the others. But that was assuming Molly had kept any of the dogs, and even beyond that Will couldn’t deny the selfish comfort that Winston being around brought him. It was the reason people kept dogs as pets anyway, supplying food and shelter in exchange for emotional fulfillment. 

Will certainly didn’t feel fulfilled, but having to feed and exercise Winston was, on some days, the main reason he got out of bed at all. He didn’t go to physical therapy, like he had promised that cloying nurse, but he did do the exercises he had been taught while he was still in the hospital. He did them to the point of tears most nights, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He’d spent years needing to keep his body in at least somewhat of a useful state, and he found himself feeling that need now, as if someone was going to come knocking on his door any day with a task that Will would need to be in shape to take on. 

Will was aware of who that ‘someone’ was, but forced himself to think away from it. Most days, even now, it was incredibly difficult to remind himself that Hannibal was actually dead. It wasn’t that he actually thought Hannibal was alive, but rather that Hannibal being dead was so bizarre a notion it simply could not take hold in his brain. Even knowing intimately the place of denial in grief, it made Will feel crazy, a feeling only comforting in its familiarity.

He considered moving almost daily, only stopped by the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea where to go. This house had been the closest thing he had to a “home” for a long time, but there was no comfort in being there. Will had left the house years ago because he was concerned he could never be in it without thinking of Hannibal, and returning to it now seemed like a colossal mistake in hindsight. Hannibal had only been inside the house a handful of times, certainly no more than eleven or twelve in the years they had known each other, but Will felt his presence like a brand. 

Or rather, Will felt his lack of a presence. 

In Will’s mind, if ever there was an argument in favor of the existence of karma, it would be this- that Will had finally given in to Hannibal, and then Hannibal slipped through his fingers. It was difficult to reckon his sincere and numbing grief at Hannibal’s death with the fact that Will had, in the way that mattered, been the one to kill him. But that wasn’t even true. Will hadn’t intended to kill Hannibal, not once they locked eyes before each taking a blade to the Great Red Dragon.

Will had intended to kill both of them, himself and Hannibal together, or to kill neither of them. As far as he knew, standing up on the cliff in Hannibal’s arms and both of them near bleeding out, they both had already been dead. 

This forced return to dull reality, once exactly what Will convinced himself he wanted, was the worst possible case scenario, and the one outcome he hadn’t accounted for. 

Will would stare at the place under his bed where Georgia Madchen had once hid and think of how she believed she was dead. Will felt the opposite, that he was mistaken in believing he was alive at all, because how could he be? In what world would he dare to live without Hannibal?

Though convinced thoroughly of his- now singular- inherent monstrousness while in the hospital, once he was off the drugs, Will mostly just found himself feeling pathetic. He ate rarely, and drank often. His divorce had been finalized, and he hadn’t spoken to another human being in over a week. It had just started to turn cold, and Will found the turn in the weather inspired him to spend some time outside before he and Winston would be stuck inside to largely hibernate for the winter.

There were motors in the barn that he had never gotten around to working on, and their problems were exasperated by being left sedentary for years on end. It definitely wasn’t a purpose, but it was something to keep his hands busy.

It wasn’t enough, but it was all he had. In the moment, Will wasn’t sure what else he was even supposed to want.

  
  


* * *

Will and Winston were in the barn when it happened. 

The night before had been particularly difficult, Will’s nightmares overwhelming not with disturbing imagery or the degree of violence, but with the degree of reality. Hazy images of Hannibal’s hands and voice, of Will being touched in front of a hot fireplace, a phantom sensation of smelling burning paper. The scent of betrayal, in Hannibal’s mind. Betrayal was a heavy thought. Had Hannibal considered their fall another act of betrayal, as Will had tipped them over? The idea that Hannibal’s last thoughts had been heartbreak made Will want to burn something down. But Hannibal hadn’t resisted. Surely he had known Will’s intentions, probably more clearly than even Will had. He had seen Will’s face, felt his arms around him. Surely he knew. He knew.

“He knew,” Will muttered to himself, accidentally causing Winston to jerk awake with a low bark.

“Sorry,” Will said to the dog. After a long moment of seemingly staring through Will, Winston lay his head back down.

The motors in the garage had either been easier to fix than Will had expected, or a complete lost cause, so Will had turned to completely gutting the barn as a method of distraction. 

It was messy, painful, and often disgusting work, and Will found it close to cathartic. He didn’t look forward to the day he would run out of menial tasks to perform. Maybe then it would be time to move, find somewhere else he could live out this forgery of a life. 

_Hannibal would find this all so distasteful_ , Will thought, while yanking disconnected wiring out of the wall with his bare hands, _he would’ve gone on a fucking killing spree if I had been the one who died_. The image of Dolarhyde’s throat between Hannibal’s teeth came to him unbeckoned.

Suddenly, without warning, Will felt a physical pain unlike any he’d felt since he got out of the hospital. He immediately tried to reach for his bad shoulder, assuming he had pulled something, but trying to pull his hand out of the wall escalated the pain from searing to absolutely excruciating. He screamed, choking on its intensity, and realized he had gotten his hand caught on something, presumably glass. Will felt the blood start to pour out of his hand. 

But he didn’t have time to figure out any more of what was happening, because as Will managed to pull his mangled hand from the wall, spewing blood all over the floor, he found himself overtaken by a sensation he had never felt in his life. 

It was close to when he had reconstructed crime scenes, but magnified. It felt as if Will was experiencing a thousand moments at once- the moments familiar, but not in the way he had originally lived them. The pain from his hand was reconstructed molecule by molecule to occur in his throat- and images flashed in his mind of crooked bloody teeth like that of a rabid, poorly bred dog, and a rapidly beating heart he recognized as his own only through intuition being mounted on a skewer. He tasted blood and raw flesh in his mouth, felt teeth digging viciously in his throat. He stood, apart and unfeeling, watching as Hannibal ripped out Will’s own throat as he had done to the Dragon. Everything hurt, and didn’t hurt, and felt cruelly delicious by the millisecond. It felt realer than any hallucination he had ever had, realer than any day he had ever lived. He watched himself kill Garret Jacob Hobbs, watched himself place a cold hand on Chilton’s shoulder, watched himself kill and mount Cassie Boyle, watched himself get flayed alive by a dark-eyed and quietly gleeful Hannibal. Will had been speaking mostly metaphorically when he once said he felt himself guilty of having committed Hannibal’s crimes. Feeling this kaleidoscope of experience, wherein he was the observer, the victim, and the perpetrator all at once, he believed for a moment that he actually had. 

The more blood that dripped from his hand, the more aggressive the sensations became, and Will fell to his knees, pulling his hand tight to his stomach to try to stop the bleeding. It felt as if something was happening to him, by him, for him, all at the same time. The scene changed suddenly, to one Will didn’t recognize- it was a graveyard and he was launching himself at a woman, and the bloodlust in that moment was so cold, something Will had felt before but never as himself, he knew he was Hannibal in that moment. Will had no idea if the scene was a flicker of another time, or a premonition of something to come. It turned again, and Hannibal was in Will’s barn, watching his own hand bleed with some kind of detached curiosity. It turned again and Will suddenly felt nothing, no pain and no detachment, and he watched in a second of brief clarity as Hannibal seemingly appeared in front of him, made out of the blood falling from both of their butchered hands, and of the blood from the woman in the graveyard. Hannibal was alive in this moment, Will realized, somewhere, somewhere _else_ , Hannibal was alive. 

The moment shattered, and Will came back into his body. He fell to the ground, face landing in a puddle of his own blood. He couldn’t even see all of his own fingers for how badly his hand was coated in red. 

Winston was standing a few feet away, on high alert. He sniffed at some of Will’s blood, whimpered as if he had been kicked, and then raced out of the barn without a single glance at Will. 

The cuts in his hand were deep but not as debilitating as Will had thought they would be, and he patched himself up the best he could once he could bring himself to walk again. The first thing he did after that, besides checking on Winston, was to order a laptop to be delivered to the house the next day. 

The experience in the barn had left Will feeling, above all else, inspired. 

And so Will spent the majority of the next day on the internet, searching for phrases and concepts he never once thought he’d have any interest in knowing anything about, trying to find something to explain what had happened the day before. 

He drudged through a lot of webpages about dream analysis and intrusive thoughts, and articles written by young witches, and wikia pages about roleplaying games. None of it was helpful in the least to Will- the closest thing that was reminiscent of what Will had experienced were references to ancient ritual blood sacrifice bringing about rebirth and reanimation. Close, but not quite. The Hannibal he had seen reflected in blood for a split second wasn’t a spirit, waiting to inhabit a new form. The concept didn’t seem _right_ to Will, didn’t seem true to what Will had seen. The Hannibal he had seen was alive, he just wasn’t alive _here_ , in the reality Will occupied now. Hannibal was alive, somewhere. Will knew this completely, in the same way he knew that the sky was blue, but he also knew, with equal conviction, that the Hannibal he had fallen off the cliff with him was dead. Where this alive Hannibal was exactly was a matter more complicated.

It was nearly midnight by the time Will finally closed the many tabs he had opened and laid down on the floor next to Winston, where he had been sleeping most nights since getting out of the hospital. 

The entire situation was crazy, crazy in a way Will hadn’t been even while encumbered with hallucinations and lost time. That said, Hannibal had seemed otherworldly more often than not, and it’s not like Will had ever had that firm of a grasp on reality. In the moment, having seen what he’d seen in the barn, the idea of being able to contact Hannibal through, well, through magic didn’t seem like the strangest thing that had ever happened to Will.

“It’s not like I have anything else to lose,” Will said into Winston’s fur.

Winston huffed out a breath in response.

Will didn’t say anything else, but in that moment, it was decided.

Will was betting everything on the idea that he could communicate with Hannibal through this blood ritual, but he felt little fear- mainly just impatience.

The idea of what he needed to do next evolved in his mind over the course of the next morning. He had jotted his thoughts down in a notebook- swearing to burn it later, God forbid it be found- on what he knew or suspected about the experience.

_-Caused by blood. (more blood=better connection?)  
_ _-I hurt my hand, Hannibal was attacking someone- at the same time?  
_ _-I felt pain of the experience of both actions_

Will stared at the paper. It wasn’t a lot to go on- definitely more question than fact. But it seemed to Will he was missing something- he thought back to what he’d been doing when the experience.

“I was thinking about Hannibal,” he said aloud. It was true, mainly because it was usually true, but something about it seemed key. He had been thinking about Hannibal ripping out Dolarhyde’s throat, and then he had _felt_ Hannibal do so. 

If the connection had come to happen by Hannibal and Will both spilling blood at the same time, and Will had been thinking of Hannibal as it happened, then perhaps Hannibal- this dislocated, alive Hannibal, wherever he was- had been thinking of Will as well. 

As Will put together the little information he knew, and the much more information he was inferring, a plan fell into place. He had to spill some blood.

Will snorted a laugh as he buried his face in his hands, forgetting for a moment about the consistent spark of pain in his cheek. _This is all, just, nonsense_ , he thought. _Complete nonsense_.

But even if this was just psychosis, beyond his usual brand, then, well, at least no one would be getting hurt who didn’t deserve it. 

Bedelia du Maurier was not a difficult person to find these days. She seemed to be on a perpetual speaking tour, traveling around the country to talk about Hannibal to the morbidly fascinated masses. Will found it disgusting, and also sickly satisfying. When Bedelia began her scam to paint herself as Hannibal’s brainwashed victim, she had done so to save her own skin. And now, it was the role she would exist in forever, every other aspect of her life watered down by the fact of her connection to Hannibal the Cannibal.

When Will typed her name into Google, every autocompleted search had to do with Hannibal. Will knew it would be the same for him, but he wasn’t bothered by it like he knew Bedelia surely was. Will didn’t have any delusions about his place in Hannibal’s world.

Will clicked on the link to her website. Her solemn, severe face gazed up at him. She would be in New York City in less than two weeks time for a series of talks about victimization at all the universities in the city. The pleasure Will felt in knowing how soon he’d be able to carry out his plan was genuinely disturbing to him- he wasn’t actually Hannibal, wasn’t able to disconnect from his empathy and kill without remorse, couldn’t separate himself from the notion that it was simply not good to take a life.

But Hannibal hadn’t wanted to turn Will into another Hannibal, at least not in the end. Hannibal had wanted for Will to be _himself,_ and the unfortunate truth was that it wasn’t like Will could just turn off his morality. And, if Will was honest, Hannibal probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near as interested in Will as he’d been if Will had been able to. Watching Will struggle with his desire was part of the fun for Hannibal.

If Will had to give Hannibal what he wanted in order to see him again, even only for a brief second in a bloody blur, Will was willing to put Bedelia on the metaphorical chopping block to do it. 

And if Hannibal _was_ out there somewhere, alive and having felt Will the same way Will had felt him, then he would surely be pleased at what Will was willing to do to bring them together.

Will used the laptop to rent a car to make the day long trek to Florida, and took off with only Winston, a sizable folder of paperwork, and his wedding ring in tow. 

Molly hadn’t deigned to move homes even after the invasion by Dolarhyde, which didn’t surprise Will. Molly loved the house, and wasn’t going to let anyone take it away from her. It looked the same as Will pulled the rental up the driveway. Molly would be at work and Wally at school, as planned, and it was picturesque in its tranquility. No serial killers here. Not anymore.

If there was a moment where reality broke through Will’s feverish quest to recreate whatever had happened in the barn, it was then, looking at this place he had lived with dogs and family and quiet. He couldn’t come back here, specifically, but he could have this again. He could have a life that wasn’t fuelled by obsession and bloodshed. Hannibal dying meant that it might even actually take for once.

The hesitation lasted only a moment, and Will got out of the car, gently leading Winston out with him.

The binder of paperwork contained documents transferring the majority of Will’s earthly possessions to Molly, mainly just the deed for the Wolf Trap house and information for his bank accounts and pensions. Will had withdrawn as much as he could from an ATM for himself, and there was some amount of money in a saving account at a bank in Louisiana, but besides that Will was happy to let everything else go to Molly. He was aware of what it looked like- him dumping his dog and all his finances onto Molly and then, if everything went to plan, disappearing off the face of the earth. Will certainly didn’t relish adding another tragedy to Molly’s life, but at least she and Wally would be taken care of. The assurance rang hollow in his own head, and Will decided to get this over with as quickly as he could.

Will placed the binder on the porch, and hesitated for a moment before placing his wedding ring on top of it. It had been removed in the hospital and he hadn’t bothered to put it back on. It wasn’t sentimental beyond its purpose- it had cost 30 dollars at a Stein Mart- but Will wasn’t sure what to do with it other than return it to Molly. If she wanted to throw it in the fireplace, or in the garbage, that was her prerogative. Hell, if she wanted to do that with the money, that was her choice as well. Will swallowed his guilt like a horse pill, thinking only briefly on how this, the confirmation of abandonment to this family he had tried to make his own, was causing him to feel more guilt than the fact that he was on his way to end someone’s life. 

He tied Winston up on the porch, leaving the paperwork and the wedding ring at his feet. Winston looked at Will in that way he did, searching and inscrutable. Will pet his head for the last time, and drove to the airport.

* * *

It was Halloween, and Will was watching the Brooklyn townhouse Bedelia was renting from afar. The choice of date wasn’t intentional, but it seemed fitting. Will thought back to the things he had read online about witchcraft- even if he didn’t think it was exactly what he personally was dealing with, it couldn’t hurt that a day so seeped in morbid ceremony would be the same day Will performed a ritual of his own.

Will watched the townhouse for a long time, his concentration snapped into focus like a lens. His pulse was steady, and he was largely unconcerned. He felt so much in his element it was vaguely disconcerting.

_Hannibal would be loving this_ , Will thought, and that was the thought that carried him through the process of breaking into Bedelia’s home in the dead of night. 

Will was careful but quick, finding Bedelia’s bedroom and knocking her out with a loud crack against her headboard before she even woke up. He carried her downstairs, shoulder twinging, and sat her up in the dining room chair. He had planned on doing this in her bedroom, but the chairs in the dining room were better suited to restraining her. 

And, only regretful because of the gross technicalities of it, Will cut out her tongue. Once out of her mouth, it had the texture and weight of a mussel, and Will considered displaying it on a plate in front of her. He decided against it and instead just threw it in the trash. The press releases would be bad enough without him trying to be whimsical in his violence. 

Bedelia sat, dressed blandly in a sweatshirt and sleep pants, head bobbing forward. Not so elegant now.

Eventually, longer than Will would have liked, Bedelia woke up. 

She came to quickly, jerking in her restraints just once before her gaze fell on Will. Recognition shown in her eyes, and then smugness, despite the situation. She opened her mouth to say something and, realizing she couldn’t, the first glint of fear showed in her face. Blood began to drip out of her open mouth.

Will felt himself smile. “I’m not Hannibal,” he said, rising from his chair and making no move to hide the knife in his hand. “I don’t want to hear you talk while I do this.”  
  
Bedelia made a noise, too dignified to be a scream but just barely, and then Will sliced open her throat. 

He thought of Hannibal as he did so, thought of Hannibal’s warm hands on his face, in the stables kept by Peter Bernardone, in Hannibal’s dining room, in Hannibal’s kitchen. Will felt the warmth rush his face, as blood spurted from Bedelia onto him, and then onto the floor. 

The pain started, more gradually than the last time, in his mouth. He felt it, almost muffled, and then with the pain of some phantom limb. He was missing his tongue. The pain spread to his right leg and the same sensation followed. Will saw himself, spread wide on display like The Vitruvian Man, missing one leg and mouth lolling open to reveal his absent tongue as well. He looked beautiful, voyeuristically strung up like that, and the thought startled Will until he realized whose thought it was. He was close.

Will jerked the blade still part of the way inside Bedelia downward toward her chest so more blood spilled out. There was a sudden pain in his neck, a sensation alarming in how it made him feel like he should be dead, like his head was twisted around but his brain hadn’t gotten the memo to turn off yet. 

Will fell, unfeeling of how his knees hit the floor for the more extreme pain in his mouth, his leg, his neck. _If this was what Bedelia felt_ , he thought, _maybe I feel guilty after all_. 

But the pain subsided, slowly, slowly, so that what remained was a subtle ache. His extremities returned to him, and the pain in his neck was just as if he had slept on it wrong. He took a moment to return his breathing to normal.

Having not even realized he had closed them, Will opened his eyes. 

He couldn’t stop his gasp. This is what he had come here for, and yet he hadn’t really thought it could happen, did he? How could he of?

Bedelia’s blood had poured from her body to create a sheen on the ground, a puddle of red-tinted black. Then the blood was rising up from the ground, filling in a form as if it was being held together by an invisible mold. The blood moved almost lethargically, taking a few moments to solidify into the shape of a man. Into the shape of Hannibal. 

Hannibal stood in front of Will, a manifestation made out of the blood they both had spilled. Will could just make out the expression on his face. He looked proud. 

The blood visage shimmered as Hannibal took a step forward. He smiled ever so slightly and said, “Hello, Will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bedelia has to pay for playing twice over, unfortunately.
> 
> thanks so much to anyone who reads this. hope you enjoy. second chapter coming soon!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for the chapter:  
> -canon typical violence, murder, and dead body mutilation  
> -previously established character death

Hannibal Lecter woke up on the frigid, wet floor of a small boat.

Even just on the edge of consciousness, Hannibal knew something was wrong. There was water in his lungs, it was so dark he could hardly see, and there was blood, well, absolutely everywhere. So much blood it was difficult to tell whether his clothes were soaked through by blood or water.

“Will,” he said lightly, his voice a bare croak. They’d gone off the cliff- what Hannibal had felt in the moment as Will’s victory, vanquishing them both to the sea. It had felt victorious for Hannibal as well, even as he considered the possibility of their deaths. It seemed pedestrian to think something such as ‘as long as we are together, whether we live or die doesn’t matter’ but it had felt true in the moment, Will with bloody teeth and whispered affirmations, touching him. Despite the blood loss and the chill, Hannibal had felt heated the entire way done, a relatively short fall which had felt like an eternity, a delicious purgatory. 

Will had taken them off the cliff, leaving their continued life up to fate. Hannibal was content to allow that, but what would follow their landing in the ocean would not be controlled entirely by fate. Will had not known that Hannibal had called upon Chiyoh to be waiting a few miles away from the cliffside in a boat. 

Hannibal knew that it was that boat that he was in, but he could not remember getting there. He felt dread come over him. “Will,” he said, louder now. He sat up, and then stood. He was aware of how much blood he had lost, and was losing, and he knew he didn’t have much longer that he would be able to stand upright. Even with the fall, the most serious of his injuries was still the gunshot- they had rotated so that Will had taken the brunt of the damage when they did finally hit the water. The idea made Hannibal’s gut ache more than any bullet. 

Will was not on the boat, was not- as far as Hannibal could tell, peering out- in the water. There was a commotion on the small patch of beach just off the cliff in which they had fallen, then, a noise quickly covered up by the sound of thunder. Hannibal couldn’t see anything.

When Hannibal looked back, Chiyoh was at the bow, wrapped up in a giant parka and a trapper hat. He couldn’t make out her features in the darkness until a flash of lightning struck. She looked unsurprisingly resolute, though the scent of her nerves struck Hannibal even beyond the outpour of his own blood.

“Closer,” is all Hannibal said, turning back to watch the beach. Chiyoh did as she was told though, even as she moved immediately and with great speed, Hannibal could sense her reluctance. 

They got closer to the beach and at first Hannibal could only see the scene in the flashes of lightning- a man he recognized as Jack Crawford by shape alone standing at the edge of the beach and staring outward, motioning as if shouting, a rush of men in black surrounding something dark and sluglike on the beach. Suddenly the scene was lit up by searchlights and the scene clarified- FBI agents were crawling the beach, and a small entourage of them were haphazardly lugging a weighted body bag back toward the bluff and away from the water. Hannibal was not used to second guessing what he saw with his own eyes, but he did then, watching what could only be Will being carried away from him in a body bag, trying to come up for any explanation for what he was seeing that wasn’t the obvious truth. 

He saw the body bag, felt the rage that followed, and then it was all black. 

* * *

Later Chiyoh would imply that Hannibal had passed out from blood loss, but the bump on his head that he did not recall waking up with on the boat made what had actually happened quite clear. He wasn’t particularly bothered by it- in Chiyoh’s mind it had surely been an act of preventive self-defense, and Hannibal could not begrudge her that. He realized, away from the moment, that there was not a world in which he survived that night if he had gone back to the shore. In the few times he had allowed himself to return to the moment in his mind however, it had seemed like the only possible thing for him to do.

Chiyoh had overall taken a severe approach to his healthcare. Though it had missed any vital organs, the gunshot wound given to him by Dolarhyde almost cost Hannibal his life twice in the lengthy journey to Japan, and once even after they had arrived. Hannibal was excessively drugged for most of it, by no means of his own volition, and he remembered little of the recovery beyond being intimately aware of both how close he was to death, and how close he was to murdering Chiyoh out of some combination of fury and frustrated exhaustion. He was never together enough to manage it, and while he would never acknowledge he was grateful to have been so drugged that he couldn’t follow through with the impulse, once recovered he did make some effort to express that he did not actually wish to kill her, though if she fully believed him, he couldn’t quite tell. 

Chiyoh had seemed aware of the constant threat of death even in the most quiet moments of recovery as well, and was more wary of him than she had ever been before. She had her gun on her even while crossing the hallway to use the restroom, and hadn’t left Hannibal unsupervised for more than 45 minutes at a time since they’d arrived in Japan.

“Doctors are the worst patients,” she said to him drily one morning as she helped him care for the exit wound he couldn’t reach without exasperating the injury further. 

Hannibal caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and was frustrated by his pallor and the obvious deterioration of muscle mass. 

Chiyoh must have sensed his mood, because she went silent until Hannibal had been fully bandaged and prodded for any sign of infection.

“Do you have a fever?” She asked, and Hannibal found himself glad she wasn’t trying to stick a thermometer in his mouth anymore. 

“No,” Hannibal answered lightly, spotting a gecko on the sill of the small window in the bathroom. “Do you know why humans don’t eat reptiles to the same degree they eat mammals and fish?”

“Because they are too quick?” Chiyoh glanced toward the gecko in something close to concern, as if she was worried Hannibal was going to snatch it up and eat it in front of her, just to prove something. “Not enough meat for the trouble?”

“Those of the order Crocodilia have plenty of meat,” Hannibal said, advancing slowly on the gecko, “though they are deceptively quick. No, the primary reason is that most reptiles are carnivores, and therefore do not lend themselves to domestication. You must supply your meat its own meat as a food source. Herbivores, and even omnivores, are much more suited for being eaten.” Lightning fast, Hannibal snatched up the gecko between two fingers. It flailed in his grasp. “Even I couldn’t make much of a meal out of this. Chiyoh, will you acquire some meat for me?”

Chiyoh’s face did not change, but Hannibal could smell an uptick of cortisol in the room. “What kind of meat?”

Hannibal let the silence fester longer than needed. “Alligator. I will make sauce piquante.”

Chiyoh exhaled, and Hannibal let the gecko loose in time with her sigh.

Hannibal’s whims and wants varied from (odd but relatively innocent) meats and ingredients to rare books and trinkets. Chiyoh was more or less indulgent- she put her foot down rarely and when she did it was usually over something Hannibal had only demanded to see her reaction. 

Baltimore was a different matter.

Chiyoh had been busy when Hannibal brought it up, which made her more flustered in response than she would have otherwise. Hannibal acknowledged that in another life he would have been charmed, or at least interested, by her fumbling with her words so much, but in the moment he just found it infuriating. 

“It is- there is no possible… Hannibal, it is not safe to go- to go to the continent at all, much less your former home.” She hadn’t even looked at him in this much concern when he had been near death.

“I thought you had no interest in caging me,” Hannibal said, voice low and legs folded up where he sat on a cushion on the floor

“There is a difference between being caged to save others and being caged to save yourself,” Chiyoh said, only just meeting his eyes. “I have no interest in the former. I consider the latter my duty. For the time being.”

“There is plenty of harm I can bring to myself here,” Hannibal said and, as it had every week at this time since they arrived, the doorbell rang. “How hazardous a job it is, delivering groceries to a shack in the mountains.”

“She’s being tracked,” Chiyoh said, realization dawning immediately. “It’s been recorded that she is here. This house is in the family’s name.”

“I know,” Hannibal said, simply. Chiyoh’s expression was still tentative, but he knew that he had won. 

“What will you do in Baltimore?” Chiyoh asked, frozen still, every word tearing out of her. 

“My lengthy recovery has made it so Will’s body is no longer any use to me in the way I would have liked,” Hannibal said. It was the first time he had consciously said Will’s name aloud since the boat, though he knew he said it in his sleep. It tasted something rotten on his tongue. “But there are things it would still be suited for.”

Chiyoh closed her eyes in a long blink, only opening them when the doorbell rang again, this time with a call of, “kanbutsuya!”

“Baltimore,” Chiyoh said in confirmation, a sigh seemingly only just held back. She went to receive the groceries, and Hannibal went back to his sketches. Baltimore, indeed.

Hannibal found the Atlantic United States a relief in climate in contrast to Japan, if not much of a relief in any other way. Chiyoh was uncharacteristically fidgety as she fluttered around the dingy motel room she had rented by cash and then hurriedly rushed Hannibal into. 

“Chiyoh,” Hannibal said, near chiding.

She didn’t stop her nitpicking, but focused it on Hannibal. He had a baseball cap low on his head, and she reached out tentatively to pull it lower over his eyes. “It’s too soon. You’re returning to the scene of the crime.”

She was right in both aspects, though Hannibal was certain she wasn’t aware to what degree. The disguise, while well meaning on her part, was useless in both how it would not come close to concealing his identity around anyone who knew his face, and in how Hannibal planned to remove it immediately once he was out of Chiyoh’s sight. 

“Tonight I will just watch, and make sure it is safe enough for us to extract the body tomorrow,” Hannibal said, the plan they had agreed on. Rather, the plan Chiyoh had agreed on. 

Hannibal stood and walked to the front door, Chiyoh trailing behind him. He turned, with half the intention to tell her off, but what he saw in her face nearly silenced his mind. Pity. The urge to kill her and be done with it came back in full force and Hannibal could not, for a moment, find the reason he had not already. Chiyoh must have seen it in his eyes because she started to step backward, but Hannibal was faster, his hand snatching out to eclipse her windpipe. She gasped but was otherwise unmoving, and Hannibal watched the calculations play out in her eyes. They had both been taught long ago, at different ages and with different intentions, calculations of time and chance and probability. Hannibal had to wonder what good it had done either of them. 

“I wonder in how many worlds do you survive this moment,” Hannibal murmured, and then released her.

Chiyoh stayed upright, but just barely. “One, at least.” Her eyes were red, but her breathing was barely labored. “I believe most, if not every.”

Hannibal agreed, even though his fingers still twitched with barely suppressed fury. “I will be back. You will be here.” He left without another word. 

Hannibal found himself capable of considering close to an endless number of scenarios at any given time, but only one had felt genuine to him since he began reconsidering what he had seen on the beach the night they slay the Great Red Dragon- that Will and Jack Crawford and the FBI had faked Will’s death in an attempt to recapture Hannibal. 

It was almost sloppy- Will had done it before, though using Freddie Lounds instead of himself- but once Hannibal considered the idea, he could not escape it. Will was the bait that he had surrendered himself to the last time and, Will, with his brilliant mind, would know what Hannibal would want to do with his body, would know that Hannibal would be coming after him even if Will would no longer be alive to see it- except Hannibal found himself convinced that Will would be alive to see it, alive to see Hannibal Lecter caught once again. And if it was true, and Will had faked his death to escape from Hannibal only to draw him back in to capture him, well, Hannibal would not sit in a cage waiting once imprisoned again. Hannibal had a knife in his pocket, but he would not resist arrest. He would get in front of Will, and he would finally have a way to express his fury. 

Hannibal arrived at the cemetery, and then easily cleared the fence and found Will’s grave, dirt still orange and raised. Hannibal picked up some of the dirt and put it in his mouth, tasting for a moment before swallowing it like a pill. There was certainly a body buried there, whether it was Will’s or not. He rested by the grave for nearly thirty minutes, eyes never leaving the plain font of the name sketched into rock. Finally, when no arrest came, he moved back a few paces to stand near a tree, and scanned the horizon. It was approaching midnight, and though he could hear the movement of other people throughout the cemetery he couldn’t see any of them. 

Hannibal found himself stumbling, almost inadvertently, through the patient’s entrance of his office in Baltimore. The room was as he remembered, pardon the intrusive flavor of those who had been there most recently- FBI techs and shortly before that the Great Red Dragon himself- scents of reality tainting a recreation meant to be perfect in its ambience if not exactly its physical elements. 

Will was not there, but he had been recently. He wandered the halls of Hannibal’s mind, quieter than when he had been alive but no less impertinent. Most of the time he ignored Hannibal in the way only Will could, avoiding him while somehow demanding his attention at the same time. When Will did look at him, blue eyes bearing into his own like fish hooks, it was so intense it slipped from his mind into reality. He would wake to find Will quiet and unmoving at the foot of his bed, bloodied and glorious as he had been in his final moments, staring at Hannibal until Hannibal became overwhelmed and allowed himself to look away- only to then find himself disappointed that Will was gone when he looked back. Mischa had done the same, years and years prior, her head and bloody little fingers sometimes just barely visible as she peaked over the end of whatever bed he had found himself in. Hannibal’s reaction to seeing Will was, as it had been when he’d seen Mischa, fury. From an objective angle, Hannibal was aware that his cruelty in response to grief at Will being gone was as childish as it had been when he had experienced at Mischa’s passing, when he actually had been a child. He indulged the violent and occasionally brutish whims and, annoyingly, knew the reason was that he didn’t have much of a choice. He had almost completely lost control of his reactions, and acting as if he wanted to be behaving so unfavorably as least hid this new, endlessly frustrating element of his life. 

If Chiyoh knew this, knew that Hannibal was behaving more impulsively cruel than he had in his long and full life of violence and revenge and righteous death, she didn’t show it. Additionally frustrating was Hannibal’s inability to figure what he wanted instead- healing had taken too long and yet not long enough for him to decide what this next course of his life would be. He had had so many plans- ideal plans and back up plans and end of the line plans, plans that both did and didn’t include Will- but found none of them to be appealing anymore. 

_I’m in crisis,_ he thought with only the slightest degree of humor, eyes focused just above the top of Will’s plain headstone, and found himself saying it aloud as well.

Hannibal was back in his old office, sitting in the chair Will himself once favored. Bedelia sat across him, resigned in her role, and with a glass in her hand. If Will was in the room with them, hidden in the mezzanine, Hannibal couldn’t tell. Probably not- Will had rather detested Bedelia, in the end. As much as Hannibal himself did enjoy Bedelia, something about being privy to glimpses of Will in distaste had always lit a small gem of pleasure in Hannibal’s chest. 

“Depression, loss, grief, aggression, risky behavior,” Bedelia said, looking Hannibal over. She herself looked resplendent, dressed in bold colors and glittering gemstones. Not fitting to the setting perhaps, but Hannibal had always enjoyed her dressed up. “What would you recommend if a patient came to you, behaving as you are now?”

“If I was a conventional psychiatrist?” Hannibal said, unhesitating. “A low dosage of Wellbutrin and consistent talk therapy. Perhaps group.” Certainly not anything he had prescribed since his residency. 

“You are not a conventional psychiatrist.” Bedelia’s tilted smile was as sickly sweet as ever. “You intend to honor him, as best you still can.”

“If he is in fact dead, yes.”

Bedelia looked at him in pity and Hannibal wanted to turn her inside out and sew Swarovski crystals into every soft part of her until she was blinding and lustrous. “If he is in fact dead,” she said, not meaning a word of it. 

Hannibal started to respond, something biting, when he smelled, over the phantom memory of Bedelia’s fine perfume and the carefully crafted familiarity of his own office, something new, something sharp and light at once. 

Hannibal had spent so much of his time incarcerated taking a respite from glass and white walls to wander and experience his memory palace, that to actually go to the space the room he had lived for three years occupied in his mind was surreal. The door was not locked, or boarded up, or only able to be opened after arduous and lengthy climbs, like other rooms were, but was simply passed over in distaste. Hannibal found himself there unwillingly as the scent filled his nostrils. 

Not something new then. Something better off forgotten. 

Hannibal opened his eyes in the cemetery, only barely controlling a twitch as he saw Alana resting on her knees next to Will’s grave. She looked guilty, and nervous. 

_How many nights do you sneak away from your beautiful wife to prostrate at the grave of a man you believe you failed to save_ , Hannibal thought, and struck down the lurch of jealousy in his gut that she got to do such a thing at all. 

If this was part of some plot to catch him, it was curious that Alana herself was there. After all the effort she had put into not landing herself on the chopping block in the pursuit of the Great Red Dragon, sacrificing poor, vacuous Chilton instead- it was odd that she would be the bait for Hannibal now.

Hannibal watched her until she moved to rise, just a few moments. He felt furious when he thought of whatever platitudes she must have murmured to that rock and pile of dirt, whether it was legitimate or not. 

He had to consciously steel himself before stepping out of the shadows and speaking. He hadn’t had to put such effort into this, before. 

“Hello, Alana.”

She didn’t flinch but it was just barely. Her hand had flown to her coat pocket even before the tell-tale tensing of her shoulders revealed she had recognized his voice. _A cell phone_ , Hannibal thought, _not a gun_. 

She turned, her expression flickering and inscrutable except for the now heavy overlay of fear. “Hello, Hannibal,” Alana said, voice softer than she probably intended. 

“I’m here to mourn him as well,” Hannibal said, and took a couple steps toward her, noting how she didn’t step back. It was dark, and she was wearing heels- she might’ve tripped over the brush or graves if she didn’t look where she was going. “I’m here to dig up his grave,” he said, purely to shock her.

“Not much in there you can eat now, Hannibal,” she said, voice unwavering. And then, still steady but desperate- “Can’t you just leave him be?”

Hannibal ignored her. The more time that went by the odder the situation became. The fear in Alana’s voice was honest. The hand in her pockets was surely calling someone- why would she need to call someone if this was part of a plan to capture him? The cemetery was filled with nature sounds and faraway footsteps but certainly not the noise of a dozen FBI agents, or hired men, or even Jack Crawford on his own lonesome crusade. The realization Hannibal had been avoiding slicked through his veins, cold and prickly. 

“He’s dead,” Hannibal said, hearing himself say it but having no recollection of doing so. To bash open Alana’s skull on the edge of Will’s headstone, turn the gray-black stone dripping in red, suddenly seemed like the only thing that made any sense. The FBI, Jack, no one was coming to arrest him. The Baltimore PD maybe, due to Alana’s hand in her pocket, but then there would be nothing. Will would not be there when he broke himself out, to kill brutally and beautifully and devour totally for his sins of betraying Hannibal one too many times. 

Alana looked uncertain- Hannibal knew this look, the look of a therapist dealing with an unruly patient, a patient thrust in the threads of delusion. 

_I’m not delusional_ , Hannibal thought. Will stood behind his own grave, watching the scene play out with angry resignation. _Not anymore_. 

It took four long paces for Hannibal to reach Alana and grab her long dark hair, pulling her toward him hard. She kicked out gracelessly but effectively, one heeled foot serendipitously hitting Hannibal close to the still healing bullet wound in stomach. He grunted but kept his grip on Alana even as she thrashed against him. It took him longer than he would have liked to get his knife out of his pocket and into his other hand. In the scuffle he had turned to face Will, ghost or hallucination that he was. Hannibal felt the loss of love but also, maybe even more keenly, the loss of potential. He saw Will, bloody mouthed, killing, killing, and then returning to Hannibal’s arms. Hannibal saw Will, and aimed the knife directly into the side of Alana’s neck. 

Alana jumped up at the last minute, taking the blade into her upper arm instead. Hannibal pulled the knife out again, barely prepared for the scent of blood suddenly taking over any other sensation, and then swung his arm to stab again. But Alana had clearly realized that she had hit an injury earlier- and she aimed another kick to his stomach. Hannibal felt it something awful but pushed it to the side, using the opportunity to kick out the leg Alana still had on the ground. 

She fell, hitting the ground with a stammered yell and grasped at the ground, shoving herself away from him. The smell of blood was overwhelming. Hannibal readjusted his grip on the blade and started his descent down to slit her throat. 

The pain he was in was extreme and Hannibal stumbled to his knees before he could make good on his plan. Whatever he was feeling, an encompassing whole body pain that hurt more than being shot or branded had, was nearly impossible to dissociate from- an issue Hannibal had rarely if ever. 

Alana stared at him with wide eyes, clearly shocked by his hesitation. 

But Hannibal wasn’t hesitating- at least not by choice. As he knelt on the dirt in which Will Graham had been buried in, Hannibal felt something wholly unfamiliar. The physical pain subsided as he was finally able to slip back into his own mind, but he still found himself frozen in place, on his hands and knees, the knife having fallen from his hand. He was on the bluff, Will in his arms for only a sweet millisecond before he was then in a rundown building he had never been in before. He still couldn’t feel anything but he could see blood seeping out of his right hand- he eyed it curiously. The air, beyond the blood, had a rural edge that Hannibal associated with the few times he had been to Will’s home in Wolf Trap. Hannibal realized he was in Will’s barn, though Will was nowhere to be found. Even in this new place, Hannibal found himself unable to move. The scene changed, blurred, until Hannibal was once again in the cemetery, still on the ground. 

Alana was gone, a tiny figure running in the horizon, her shoes and a small pool of blood left behind. The noise of sirens sounded in the distance, but Hannibal couldn’t bring himself to be concerned. When he lifted his head he saw Will- not as he had been seeing him before, an almost perfect memory to taunt and torture him, but Will. Instead of bloody he was quite literally made up of blood, Alana’s blood on the ground pouring upward to create the shape of him. Hannibal could just barely make out his expression but his face, confused and frowning, made him ache. _Will is alive_ , Hannibal realized, _somewhere else, Will is alive_. 

The bloody form dissipated and Hannibal slowly gained control of his limbs again. He stood and his mind raced with this new information, he found himself almost annoyed by the sirens now settled at the entrance of the cemetery. Three Baltimore police officers were searching the cemetery for him, and Hannibal felt the urge to dispose of them like pests and bring breakfast home to Chiyoh. 

He centered himself as he eyed the cemetery for the best escape route instead. He couldn’t resist from crouching and running his hand through the blood still on the ground. He spared a glance to Will’s headstone. The body buried there was no longer Will, no longer had his delightful brain to prod and nurture. Will was somewhere else. 

Hannibal made a clean escape from the cemetery and back to the motel. He took as long a route as he could bear. He had to get out of Baltimore, and soon. 

“We must leave,” Hannibal said as soon as he arrived back to the motel room. 

Chiyoh looked irritated, but not surprised. “What about Will? Did you find him?”

Hannibal hesitated for only a moment before starting to pack. “You knew.”

Chiyoh didn’t respond, starting to wipe down the dresser and sink in the bathroom. Fortunately neither of them had used the beds yet. 

“I saw Alana Bloom at the cemetery. By this point, the FBI will have likely already been alerted to my presence in the city. The local police are already aware.” Hannibal stacked their bags by the front door and began to trail Chiyoh, observing and silently neatening her work. 

Chiyoh stopped suddenly, turning so that they were face to face, close enough to be breathing the same air. “That isn’t all,” she said. “What about Will?”

“I wasn’t aware you were that concerned with him.”

“I’m not concerned with him beyond his application to you.” Chiyoh’s expression was searching. “You are more alive in this moment than you have been since I retrieved you from the ocean. You found him.”

Hannibal knew they didn’t have time for this, but could also tell Chiyoh wasn’t moving until she had an answer. “I saw Will in the cemetery, but not in the traditional sense of sight. I am not certain where Will is, but I am certain he is alive.”

“You thought he was alive before. That’s why we came to Baltimore.”

“I thought he was alive then,” Hannibal agreed. “I know he’s alive now.”

“Alive… somewhere else,” Chiyoh said, the beginning sparks of understanding showing in her eyes. 

“There’s no time,” Hannibal said, and Chiyoh acquiesced. They both sanitized the motel room the best they could under the circumstance and loaded into the rented car. 

Chiyoh drove, clearly nervous but not asking Hannibal if there was a plan. Hannibal remained quiet, and within the hour they had arrived at a field, empty pardon a small house and a small plane. Hannibal looked at Chiyoh, close to amused, and she shook her head. “He was not expecting us until tomorrow- this may be difficult. I will handle it.” She looked like she expected Hannibal to argue. 

But Hannibal agreed, only getting out of the car to collect their bags. He looked up at the stars, brighter than they had been in Baltimore. He wondered what Will, the Will he had seen in blood, saw when he looked into the sky. He wondered if their stars were the same. 

* * *

Hannibal and Chiyoh ended up being dropped off, with little trouble and in just over three hours, in Kansas. From where they had been left by their silent pilot, they hiked two more hours until they reached a small house shockingly similar in style to where they had been staying in Japan.

“This isn’t one of my properties,” Hannibal said, resenting the airiness in his voice even as he clutched at his stomach. He hadn’t even looked to see if Alana had opened any wounds. 

Chiyoh gave him a look he couldn’t entirely place. “It’s not,” was all she said in response. 

They settled in and Hannibal reluctantly let Chiyoh look his new injuries over before he took a quick, perfunctory shower. By the time he was out and dressed in pajamas, Chiyoh was settled in a pile of blankets on the ground in the living room of the small house, a space heater and three cups of tea set up in front of her. Hannibal was struck by a memory of another time so suddenly he felt vertiginous. He swallowed hard and settled on the floor with her. It hurt his aged back more than his wounded stomach.

They sipped tea until finally Chiyoh spoke. “Humans are allowed the… luxury of believing in God abstractly.”

Hannibal watched the space heated as he would a fire. “Abstractly- but not concretely,” he agreed. “It is considered normal, if quaint, to believe in an omniscient being who can offer guidance if correctly tempted. Once one claims to be interacting with angels and demons on the physical plane however, it is a mark of insanity.”

“You are not insane.”

“I am not. I have seen evidence of another world with the same certainty Joan of Arc heard her angels.” Hannibal reached over to one of the bags still stacked behind the sofa to pull out a notebook. He handed it to Chiyoh, who received it like a dagger. “Every religion from the ancient to the New Age has both elements of science and magic in it’s theology. In our shared religion of a sort, I was always more drawn to the scientific methods of prayer.” 

Hannibal watched as Chiyoh flipped through the notebooks, touching the formulas scrawled on the pages with something close to reverence. “It is what we were taught,” she said, simply. “You never achieved… enlightenment through these methods?”

“If I did, would we be sitting here alone?” Hannibal asked. “Would the third cup of tea you poured remain full?”

“I am surprised it is not yet shattered,” Chiyoh said, not meeting his eyes. 

Hannibal considered it, but turned his glance back to the notebook. “We were taught to believe in the mathematics of time. Robertus always swore by the more occult methods.”

“Blood magic,” Chiyoh said, and it sounded like a curse. 

“You must go home,” Hannibal said, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth. “You must get Robertus’ mirror from the estate.”

Chiyoh looked at him as if he had struck her. “I cannot be a part of this.”

Hannibal’s eyes narrowed and he reached for the untouched teacup after all. He did not throw it, but crushed it in his hand. He did not react to the porcelain cutting into his skin, or the hot tea stinging the wounds. “You do not have a choice.”

Chiyoh didn’t look away from his face, but her fingers twitched against her own cup. “How do you know this will work?”

Hannibal brushed the remaining shards from his hand, and returned to staring at the space heater. For a moment, he was in his office in Baltimore again, on the eve of Abigail’s final death. Then he was somewhere darker, and colder, and then he was back in Kansas with Chiyoh. “I have worked to achieve a moment in which I could reverse the streams of time and reality to return to Mischa. I have considered universes where she would have grown to adulthood, and how I could travel to those universes and take the place of my self that exists in them. I have failed on every account. Seeing Will Graham in the cemetery was not a failure, and I wasn’t even aware I was trying to reach him. I spilled blood, and his image rose up from that blood.”

“You believe he is… participating in blood magic as well.” 

“Unintentionally on his part, most certainly, but yes.”

Chiyoh rested a hand on the notebook of calculations as if it was a bible. “How do you know this will work?”

Hannibal hesitated a few moments before responding to the question again. It would cost Chiyoh to receive the mirror. She would need motivation beyond threats and obligation due to kinship. _Pity_ , Hannibal thought, and he considered Will. 

“If there is a chance to see him again,” Hannibal said, feeling as if he was pulling the words out of his gut with pliers- not because of their dishonesty, but because of exactly how honest they were- “I am willing to trust the unknown.”

Chiyoh did not say anything in response, but when Hannibal woke up the next morning, he felt no trepidation at finding her gone. 

Hannibal set himself to work. The mirror would be an ideal way to communicate long term plans, if it worked at all, but first Hannibal would need to make sure Will- the Will that was out there somewhere, accidentally invoking blood magic, brilliant man- knew what was happening. For that, Hannibal began to plan a recreation of what had happened in the cemetery, but with more intention and less interruption. 

Hannibal thought back to his conversation with Bedelia in the cemetery, or rather with the Bedelia who took up residence in his mind. Hannibal had planned to honor Will by creating a tableau that had Will been alive to see it he would have found atrociously, achingly beautiful. A testament to Will’s mostly unfilled desire for brutality and power. 

_Perhaps honoring Will’s desires is still the way to go_ , Hannibal thought, and he reached for his tablet. 

Bedelia had, wisely, retired to a quiet life. It took effort to find her at first, but once Hannibal had started looking for homes rented under her mother’s maiden name, it became almost disappointingly easy. 

She was in Calgary, and the process to get to her took nearly a month, what with the added precautions needing to be taken due to Hannibal’s recent resurgence on the FBI radar. Hannibal received only one correspondence from Chiyoh in the meantime, tersely telling him that she had obtained the mirror from the estate and was waiting in a hamlet on the east coast of Latvia for his arrival. Hannibal found himself uncharacteristically struck by impatience as he staked out Bedelia’s home for the fourth evening in a row. Despite believing whole-heartedly that Will was alive somewhere, and even having a considerable amount of certainty that he would be trying to reach Hannibal as well, if he could figure out how, the logistics were still a concern. It had seemed, by Hannibal’s temporary teleportation to Will’s barn, smelling of oil and blood, that their connection had been caused by spilling blood at the same time. Hannibal was comfortable in his ability to know what to do instinctually, but even having a window of time would have been preferable. He found himself waiting for something to act, but he hadn’t any idea what. 

Hannibal stood in the shadows as, to his initial confusion, a line of children in garish costumes walked down the street, carrying pillowcases and plastic pumpkins. Resolution fell over Hannibal. This would be the day to pray for the faithful departed. 

By the time Bedelia was conscious enough to have a conversation (and conscious enough to attempt to hide away an oyster fork, which Hannibal easily confiscated) the scene had been set. Hannibal had come to her home with the intent to kill her but there was certainly no reason to waste an opportunity for a meal, and some good company. 

Bedelia looked as resplendent as she had when Hannibal thought of her in the cemetery- he had made her that way. He had cut off one of her legs and then, while dinner cooked, dressed her unconscious body, curled her hair, set her dining room table, and then prepared the rest of their meal. It was nearly midnight by the time they began to dine.

“You’re certainly taking this loss exactly as I would have expected you to,” Bedelia said. Hannibal watched her throat nearly the entire time she ate. Never brutish in anything she did, the bites she took of her own leg were near microscopic, but eat it she did. 

“I am here to spill your blood in an ancient blood ritual in order to communicate with Will, who lives on in another reality.” Hannibal said, because he had no reason not to.

Bedelia’s teeth knocked against the fork in surprise. After a long moment of processing, she began eating again. “Perhaps not exactly as I expected you to.”

“I appreciate you, Bedelia,” Hannibal said, setting his own fork down. He had rushed, and already finished his own serving. He wished Will would have been able to eat with them. “I know Will will appreciate your role in this as well.”

“I always assumed your talk of time travel and… other places was metaphorical,” Bedelia said. Hannibal believed he had never seen her look so alarmed. “Perhaps you are insane after all.”

It was a nasty thing to say to a patient, and Hannibal found himself jarred by it. _How uncomfortable Bedelia must be_ , he thought, _to resort to such a thing_. 

Hannibal knew Will would have been twitching out of his seat in annoyance, and Hannibal felt rather similarly. Indeed, he felt overall irritated by something unknown, as if he had left something in the oven. It took Hannibal longer than he would have liked to realize what it was, but once he did, the excitement flared in his gut. The instinct that Hannibal had been so sure would guide him kicked in, and he stood.

At the sudden movement, Bedelia trailed off. She had begun speaking again, though Hannibal hadn’t been listening. She looked scared, and Hannibal felt disgust. 

With the thought of Will- Will dissecting Hannibal’s actions as the Ripper in front of a classroom, Will with teeth bloodied, Will coming into his arms on the edge of the cliff- heavy in the forefront of his mind, Hannibal snapped Bedelia’s neck. He retrieved the knife from his pocket and drug it across Bedelia’s throat. 

He sidestepped the spray, but didn’t take his eyes off it. Blood pooled on the ground and then, gradually, began to rise. Even with Hannibal’s certainty, it felt like a miracle. The searing, all encompassing pain he had felt in the cemetery took over, concentrated in his neck and at his throat. It was joyous. The pain subsided quickly and suddenly the air around Hannibal changed- he was in the dining room in one second and then he was somewhere else, a liminal space he could not name or categorize. Above him, Will was held aloft in the air- he was missing the same leg Bedelia had lost and, Hannibal realized when Will’s mouth opened, his tongue as well. He looked beautiful. Hannibal ached to reach out to him, but his limbs were frozen in place. Will split open, blood pouring out of his chest like an opening of floodgates. 

The scene blurred, and Hannibal was on his knees in the dining room, Bedelia still leaking blood beside him. Hannibal stood.

The blood was still taking shape, rising up and forming into the shape of a man- on his knees, head tilted downward like he was praying. 

As the blood filled out the form, making it clearer and finer, red droplets shaping Will’s eyelids and curls, the bloody visage Hannibal recognized in all parts of him as _his Will_ , opened his eyes. 

He looked shocked. He looked lovely. 

Hannibal took a step forward, unable to resist the twitch of his hands, the barely constrained impulse to grab and never let go. 

“Hello, Will.”

* * *

* * *

* * *

Will Graham stared, unblinking, for a few moments. He found himself fascinated by how the blood rippled when Hannibal took a step toward him, parting for a brief second only to reform. 

Will stood slowly, meeting Hannibal’s eyes. Even made up of blood, there were variations in the shade and shimmer that allowed him to see Hannibal’s dark pupils, the color of his irises, his faint eyelashes. _If this is a hallucination_ , he thought, _it's ridiculously detailed_. 

Hannibal looked at him, glancing from the knife still in Will’s hand to the still healing scar on his cheek. Will felt stripped, flayed alive by it.

“It’s good to see you,” Will breathed out, barely loud enough for Hannibal to hear.

The smile Hannibal gave him in response was likely the brightest Will had even seen on Hannibal’s face. “It’s good to see you, Will.”

“I killed Bedelia. I slit her throat because I thought- I saw you, a vision of you when I hurt myself and I thought…” Will trailed off. Hannibal, pleased as he was, certainly didn’t seem surprised, or anywhere as uncertain of what was happening as Will. “You’re dead. You died in the water, after...” _after I tried to kill us both_ , Will didn’t say. 

Hannibal nodded. “And where I am now, you are dead.”

It took Will a moment to catch up, but when he did he was struck by worry. ”So you’re- in another world? Are you-” He didn’t know how to word it. 

“If you are asking if I am exactly the same man with whom you went off the cliff, I suppose the answer would be no. As far as I can tell at this moment, we existed in the same reality up to a point, in which our realities split. We exist in separate realities, wherein something happening during or shortly after the moment of impact that caused each of us to die. I believe we are able to communicate through ritual magic because of how closely our realities align. They are… echoes of one another, it seems.”

The answer was long-winded, but Will found himself luxuriating in it, even though he winced slightly at the term ‘ritual magic’. He thought he would never hear Hannibal say new sentences again, never truly talk to Hannibal again. “None of this seems particularly shocking to you.”

“I admit my references to blood ritual in the past were more symbolic than literal,” Hannibal said, “but there are elements of what we are experiencing that are reminiscent of if not exactly experiences I was taught about by my aunt and uncle, as a young man.”

“Teacups and rules of disorder.”

“More or less.” Hannibal leaned forward slightly, and Will knew if they were sitting he’d be crossing his legs. “You murdered Bedelia. You spilt her blood.”  
  
“Yes. I hurt my hand and I had this- image of you attacking someone. I felt it, I felt you attacking her, and then I saw you in the blood. I wanted to see you again, see if you were real, so I-” Will gestured to Bedelia’s corpse, though he figured Hannibal couldn’t see anything but Will himself, as Will could only see Hannibal, and not his surroundings. 

“Brilliant,” Hannibal said, near reverent, and Will felt his ears heat. “I also murdered Bedelia. To honor you.”

Will blinked. He hadn’t been expecting that, and it caused a twin ache and pleasure in his chest. “How? We- we did this at the same time. It’s how this works, right? How? How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I knew you would figure out how we were able to see one another the first time, and planned to see you again in the same way. But that particular aspect of the ritual working seems to have been left up to fate. And the fates responded.”

“You don’t leave anything up to fate.”

“Very rarely,” Hannibal agreed, and then- expression curious. “That was the motivation behind taking us off the bluff.”

“Not the only motivation.”

“Very rarely do intelligent creatures behave with only one motivation.”

Will felt the urge to skirt that conversation, for now. “We just happened to pick the same moment to kill Bedelia. You’re a lucky bastard, Hannibal.”

Hannibal took a few seconds, apparently to consider the concept. Will had been unable to look away from Hannibal- there being nowhere else he felt any desire to look, and it was only because of that he was able to notice the fine details of the blood vision beginning to fade away. Fear struck him. They were running out of time. 

“Most of my good fortune in my life has come as a result of planning and previous years of hard work,” Hannibal said finally, “but it would be narcissistic of me to pretend there are not moments in my life influenced by what would seem to be luck.”

Will had to hold back a laugh. _Wasn’t that the fucking truth_. “God forbid you say something narcissistic,” he said instead.

Hannibal gave him a flat look. “That said, there is no guarantee we will be so fortunate again.” Hannibal had a flicker of something dangerous in his eyes that made Will’s heart pick up pace. “If we are to meet again, we must discuss how and where.”

“And when,” Will murmured. 

At Will’s easy acceptance, Hannibal’s expression faltered, and Will found it reflected in a flickering of the bloody form of him. There was something bitter in his voice when he spoke again. “This is what you want, then, Will? To continue on this path of ritual and sacrifice?”

They had been in the middle of something, when they’d been so rudely separated by death, and Will had wanted to return them to that moment where they, be they dead or alive, were at least together. What led to or followed that, Will wasn’t sure. 

It was there, being led to the thought by Hannibal, as he often had been, that Will realized that the ball was, inexorably, in his court. He could leave, say goodbye to Hannibal and mean it, and as long as he was careful around glass and knives for the rest of his life, there would be no way for Hannibal to contact him. The problem being, Will wouldn’t mean it. In all the versions of himself and Hannibal that had interacted, in all the settings they had been placed, never had Will been so simply sure of where they stood with one another as he had been on the cliff- even with their last moment being one that had led to their unintentionally separate deaths. 

Will saw fear in Hannibal’s expression, each of them standing aside a differently dead Bedelia du Maurier, fear that Will was there to close the door forever. Fear that no one else would have been able to discern on that inscrutable face. But Will knew what he wanted.

 _Besides_ , Will thought as he looked at Bedelia’s body, flopped over itself, _I’ve shot any chance of a quiet life away this time._

“Did you eat her?” Will asked, though he knew the answer. It wouldn’t change Will’s response, but he wanted to hear Hannibal say it. “The Bedelia in your world.”

“Yes,” Hannibal said unwavering. “We dined on her leg before I killed her. I found myself able to think of little but how I wished you could partake.”

Will wished he could have been there to partake as well.

“I haven’t felt like myself,” Will said. “With you gone. I want to be myself again.”

“For the first time, you mean,” Hannibal responded, never one to not get the last word.

Will breathed out a laugh, not annoyed by the jab, especially with the softness of Hannibal’s expression. 

“For the first time,” he agreed easily. “You know what this is. Can you come to where I am? Or I go to where you are?” Or-” _Time did reverse_ , said a voice in Will’s head, and something dawned on him. “Can we go back to the cliff? Can it be different this time?”

“We can exist on the same plane again. Of that I am certain. Other details are less clear.” Hannibal paused. “From where I currently stand, it seems the wisest course of action would be to enact a blood ritual with the intent of carrying you from your current reality into mine.” 

Will nodded. It seemed he’d be following Hannibal blind through whatever was happening- which wasn’t exactly unfamiliar.

“There isn’t enough time to discuss it here- you are already fading away in front of me.” Hannibal’s voice was frustrated, and near emotional. Will wished he could still see his face clearly. “I believe there is another way- a way we can communicate that will last for more than just a few moments. You should find Chiyoh.”

“Where?”

Hannibal tilted his head, not in confusion- never confusion- but curiosity. He avoided the question he clearly had and said instead, “Tell me about the circumstances of my death, Will.”

The request was like a punch to the gut. Will had spent weeks trying to stop thinking about Hannibal’s corpse, grey and lifeless. “I woke up on a beach. You were dead in the water. I tried to get to you but- Jack. And you were already gone.”

Hannibal looked contemplative, apparently unconcerned about his dead self. “Chiyoh was supposed to be there, in a boat, just off the beach. Just in case.”

Will hadn’t known that, but wasn’t surprised. And then he remembered something. “I saw a boat- after I realized you were- gone, I saw a boat on the horizon. I thought I was imagining it.”  
  
“Chiyoh was there then,” Hannibal said.

“You were just already gone,” Will finished. 

Hannibal closed his eyes and then sighed softly. “I believe Chiyoh will be at my childhood home, but I cannot be certain. Either way, there is a mirror on the grounds that we should be able to communicate through. It is not outwardly valuable, so it should still be there, but still it would be best if Chiyoh was there to help you find it. As I’ve been told, it can only be used once, so we must be cautious with it.”

“A mirror?” Will asked, trying not to judge too harshly the elements of the new world he had found himself in. “How does it work?”

“It will act as a catalyst. The ritual will be carried in the same way- us spilling blood at the same moment, but we will be able to communicate through the mirror instead.”

Will couldn’t deny the idea sounded nicer than blood forms, though he wasn’t sure Hannibal would agree, aesthetically. “When? I can be there in a few days, surely.” Will had enough money from the ATM for a flight to the Baltic, if not much else beyond that. 

“A week from now exactly,” Hannibal said, resolute. Then, he hesitated and he flickered in Will’s vision again. “A week, and twelve hours. So that I can see you in the sunlight.”  
  
The ache in Will’s chest was back. “Hannibal,” he said, uncertain of what else there was to say. He couldn’t make out Hannibal’s expression at all anymore, just inky red. 

“A week and twelve hours time. Find Chiyoh if you can. A mirror on the grounds of the estate. Spill blood to activate it.” Even Hannibal’s voice had started to fade. “We will be able to talk more, then.”

“Hannibal,” Will said again, unable to resist how lost he already felt. “A week and twelve hours. Find Chiyoh. Mirror at the estate. Blood.”

“Good,” Hannibal said. “Very good, Will.”

Will felt the air around him crackle, and then Hannibal was gone. Will found himself bereft, and altogether unable to look at Bedelia. Even dead, he somehow expected her to have a comment on what she had been witness to. 

_A week and twelve hours. Chiyoh. A mirror in Lithuania. Blood._ Will found himself thinking the words on repeat. With Hannibal gone again, it was incredibly difficult for Will to consider any of it real. _Week and twelve hours. Chiyoh. Mirror. Blood._ Twelve hours because Hannibal wanted to see him in the sunlight. 

Will fell to his knees again. Blood soaked through his slacks. He rubbed his eyes with his wrist, somehow spared from the blood, hard. He couldn’t tell if it was from stress, or exhaustion, or sheer emotion, but he wanted to cry. Inexplicably, what he was feeling strongest was loneliness. 

_Week and twelve hours. Chiyoh. Mirror. Blood_. Will stood, pocketing the blade in his hand. _Week and twelve hours. Chiyoh. Mirror. Blood._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this month long gap between updates wasn't intended- life and priorities and all that. i don't know if anyone is waiting for updates or anything, but- in the interest of holding myself accountable- next chapter should be up in more or less a week.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for the chapter:  
> -canon typical violence, murder, dead body mutilation, previously established character death, smut

It was the second time in his life Will Graham had traveled to Lithuania chasing ghosts, but he found himself somehow even more lost than he had been the first time, despite having a name and a tangible goal, which was certainly more than he had last time. 

Hannibal had seemed overall uncertain if Chiyoh would actually be in Lithuania at all, so when Will stepped off of a train platform to see her standing there, he briefly wondered if he was seeing things. She looked as he remembered, pardoning the rifle, which thankfully seemed to be absent. 

“Chiyoh,” Will said. He wasn’t scared of her, necessarily, but did find himself suddenly unnerved to be in her presence. 

She didn’t seem any less alarmed, or surprised, to see him as he was her. “Will Graham,” she said. They both stood still for a moment, neither of them clear of what exactly was happening.

“I have a story for you,” Will said, speaking quietly, moving as close to her as he dared. He was reminded of the process of trying to coax a stray into trusting him. 

“I know your sorrows,” Chiyoh said. She was looking at him like _he_ was the wild animal. “I was there.” She seemed decided then, and started to walk away, and Will cursed as he tried to keep pace with her. 

“Are you staying at the castle?” Will asked, and was ignored. “I need to go there. I need to find Robertus’ mirror.” 

That stopped Chiyoh in her tracks, so quickly that Will almost ran into her. She turned and they were close enough to breathe each others’ air. “Who told you about that?”

“Hannibal did,” Will said. He could see on it Chiyoh’s face when she realized, to some degree, what was happening.

Chiyoh ended up agreeing to go to the estate with him, but that was the extent of her help. Will told her the majority of the story as he searched the castle for a mirror- or a sign of a mirror having ever been there at all- though she seemed to have already figured out the majority of it. She didn’t help him find the mirror, as Hannibal implied she would, but Will couldn’t figure out if he could count that up to her apparent dislike of blood magic or her even more apparent dislike of him. 

She simply watched him, and Will found the pressure made the gargantuan task even more maddening. The castle was giant, and very far past run down. It seemed as if anything of value had been taken a long, long time ago, and Will was beginning to genuinely panic by the time he finally yanked open a wardrobe door to find both a small colony of moths and- miraculously- a plain mirror. 

“Is this it?” Will asked, looking back at Chiyoh. He felt disgusting, covered in grime and sweating even in the frigid temperature. Chiyoh seemed unaffected, pardon the look in her eyes, like she was bearing witness to natural disaster, something awful she couldn’t dare to stop. She didn’t need to answer. 

* * *

* * *

* * *

Hannibal arrived in Latvia with a single bag and a great sense of relief- it wouldn’t have been catastrophic if he had been recognized in the journey from Canada to the Baltic, but it certainly would have been annoying. The hamlet in which Chiyoh had told him she would be staying had exactly one inn, and when Hannibal went inside to inquire about rooms he was given a key and told that- while she wasn’t there at the moment- his ‘friend’ had already paid for the room for a week. 

Hannibal reclined on the bed in the room; there wasn’t anywhere else to sit. The inn was the sort of building that felt as if it was made entirely of straw- every noise made in the building echoing from corner to corner. It was also miserably cold, so cold Hannibal didn’t even consider undressing, and closer to his birthplace than he’d been since he left. All of that, and the fact that since speaking to Will his depression based frustration had quickly turned into impatience based frustration, made him twitchy, and he was annoyingly aware of it, as was Chiyoh. She didn’t stay in the inn with him, and Hannibal wasn’t entirely certain where she was staying elsewhere. Hannibal’s days waiting for his and Will’s next meeting were spent mainly in the halls of his memory, researching and theorizing- there were so many unknown elements of this, and so many questions Will would surely have. Hannibal, if all this were to go to plan, would need the right answers. 

On the day of the meeting, Hannibal woke pre-dawn, and found Chiyoh waiting outside with two bicycles. Hannibal’s stomach twinged at the thought of cycling for too long, but he didn’t comment. It was a long ride, and Hannibal focused exclusively on the back wheel of Chiyoh’s bicycle. Eventually, just as the sun had started to peak over the horizon, she turned off the road and led them down a gravel road up to a dilapidated barn. Hannibal had a brief sensation of suddenly appearing in Will’s barn in Virginia when he had been in the cemetery. 

The barn was empty pardon detritus and a single cardboard box sitting alone in the center of the room. Hannibal couldn’t deny it felt anticlimactic. He glanced back at Chiyoh. 

Her eyes were on the box. “It wouldn’t do anyone good for it to have broken in transportation.”

 _Fair enough_. Hannibal easily removed the mirror from the box and took it outside, settling it against a window sill at eye level. It was a simple glass surrounded by a slate frame, just large enough that Hannibal could see his face and shoulders in the reflection. The mirror had been a minor detail of Hannibal’s childhood beyond the fact that it had been the only time he had heard reference to his uncle, before his parents’ death. He had a single, fuzzy memory of briefly wondering why, exactly, an uncle he had never known was keeping a mirror at the estate, and never thinking of it again until he actually met Robertus. 

“I will need you to help activate the mirror, when the time comes,” Hannibal said, voice casual. “Though there may still be time for you to offer up someone in your place, if you prefer.” Chiyoh froze, eyes narrowed. Hannibal continued- “Though of course anyone outside the family who witnesses this would then need to be killed.”

“Who would run your errands then,” Chiyoh said. It wasn’t a question. 

“Not all of your life, Chiyoh. Just enough.”

“No one else should be here,” Chiyoh said finally, though Hannibal could practically feel her mind still spinning. 

They waited- the knife folded in Hannibal’s coat pocket felt heavier with each passing minute. Finally, it was time. Hannibal felt the anticipation of sitting before a grand feast, but magnified. 

“Come to me,” he said, to Chiyoh, holding out one hand. 

Chiyoh walked over to him, unflinching when he took her by the wrist and upturned her palm. He did not tell her what would happen next; she already knew. 

Hannibal drew the knife from his pocket, and-

The movement was clean and quick enough Hannibal hadn’t known it happened until the blade sliced over his own palm, deeper than he would have preferred. He grunted more in surprise than pain. He and Chiyoh were suddenly much closer, her looking up at him with a dark expression. She had slipped her wrist from his grasp just so, able to take the handle of the blade in her own hand. Hannibal’s nostrils flared at the scent of his own blood.

Chiyoh’s expression was dark. “He’ll like your blood more.”

Hannibal felt a spark of amusement but it was quickly pushed aside when the mirror began to shimmer, nearly infinitesimal pulses. Hannibal opened his palm, the knife falling to the ground. Chiyoh was moving behind him- going back into the barn- but Hannibal paid her no mind. He was thinking of Will, bloody and transcendent on the cliff, willingly going into Hannibal’s arms. 

Hannibal looked in the mirror and saw himself. In the next instant, so suddenly as if it had happened in a place beyond time, he was looking at Will instead. He was smiling broadly, his hair lit dark amber in the sunlight, the pink scar on his cheek in stark contrast to the rest of him, youthful and buoyant. If Hannibal had any hesitation left in his mind about what must be done, it left him then. He would never allow Will to escape him again.

* * *

* * *

* * *

Will grinned when Hannibal appeared in the mirror. He couldn’t help it- the relief that the ritual worked and genuine pleasure at seeing the other man lighting him up. He bit his lip, a tad sheepish, to try to school his expression. 

Hannibal looked, as he usually did, collected, but there was something in his eyes that gave him away. _Eyes_ , Will thought, _you see too much, you don’t see enough_. He wondered how he had never been able to see it before. There was so much he wanted to say; he didn’t know what they had time for. 

“How long?” He said, voice rough. “How long do we have?”

“Long enough. An hour at the most. And then, supposedly, the mirror will shatter.”

Will nodded. An hour had never seemed so consequential. 

“It seems you’ve taken to the slipping of reality rather well. What you perceived to be reality.”

 _You made sure of that_ , Will thought. Ever since meeting Hannibal his life had been turning more and more into a surreal nightmare. What was a magic mirror in comparison to everything else?

He said, “Once we were almost fed to pigs. I’ve followed ghosts. We slayed a dragon.” He gave Hannibal a wry smile. “Hell, my psychiatrist turned out to be a cannibal. I think it’s getting more difficult for things to surprise me.”

Hannibal looked at him with insurmountable fondness and Will thought- _this is it_. What he had been chasing through gaps of space and dimension for. Someone who looked at him like that. The only person who ever could.

“It is… upsetting to not be able to touch you.” Will was hardly thinking as he said it, but it seemed to delight Hannibal. It barely even made sense- Will had rarely if ever been the one to touch Hannibal, it had always been the other way around. 

“And how would you touch me, Will?” His voice rumbled. Something twisted in Will’s gut, and for the first time since seeing Hannibal, Will was aware of the fact that Chiyoh was possibly still within hearing distance.

“What if I said I would tighten my hands around your throat. Kill you.“ It was a dark joke, especially when there was always a chance it wasn’t a joke. ( _It’s what I did before_ , Will thought, remembering Florence and knowing Hannibal could be remembering countless other times they’ve betrayed each other).

Hannibal wasn’t bothered by it, the light in his eyes not dimming. “There is nothing I would not welcome from you, Will. Any and every touch would be a benediction. The memory of your arms the night we slayed the dragon has proved to be an inspiration in my efforts to find you.”

“We’ll be able to see each other again- in the same place.” Will heard the desperation in his own voice. “You’re sure.”

“Yes,” Hannibal said. “When I was a teenager and came under the guardianship of my uncle, I was taught about the insubstantial nature of reality and time. My aunt and uncle possessed a number of magical artifacts, including at one point this mirror, and they both gave me tentative educations on seeing into other worlds and, supposedly but never successfully, what could be considered time travel.”

The information took hold easily in Will’s mind. His comment earlier hadn’t been only in jest- being in Hannibal’s orbit had only ever taught Will that his reality, his perceptions of himself and the world around him, could be so easily changed. 

“Would you have ever told me about- all this? If this hadn’t happened.”

“Perhaps, one day. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you, or have you think me insane.”

Will blinked, thinking it must be a joke but not entirely sure. “Right.”

Hannibal’s expression was thoughtful. “Forgive me for not asking sooner- how were your travels?”

“Fine. I mean, I was just trying to get here. To now. Chiyoh found me basically as soon as I got to Lithuania.” 

“She has an uncanny sense of timing,” Hannibal agreed. “And you had no trouble finding the mirror?”

“No,” Will said, a half-truth. “Though Chiyoh seems… concerned.” 

“It is a dangerous art,” Hannibal said. “As all art of any value is dangerous. When we were young we saw first hand the potentially deadly effects of failed rights of ritual magic. I admit I always found it too volatile a practice to take seriously.”

“And now? You seem certain in its authenticity.”

“Now it is the only clear path I see to being in the same plane as you. There is nothing I am not willing to try.” 

“What is it then, that we’ll have to do? You said I could come to where you are.” The idea of them both returning to the universe in which they had died hung onto Will like a burr. “Could we not-”

“No,” Hannibal said, oddly resolute. Then, expression inscrutable- “If there is a way for us to return to before our moment of impact, with certainty that we would survive, I am not aware of it. I’m sorry, Will.”

The apology and admission of ignorance left Will feeling uncomfortable enough for the bramble to slip easily from his mind. “It will be as if I was dead, if I leave this… timeline.” 

“As if you slipped from the world unnoticed.”

Will couldn’t deny he liked the idea- it was certainly one he had desired over the course of his life- and there was a certain amount of satisfaction in that he would have succeeded in ridding at least one universe of him and Hannibal both. 

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, Hannibal.” Will felt a sense of relief in admitting it- he had admitted many things to Hannibal over the years, and it was an odd comfort he couldn’t deny the legitimacy of. 

“Then trust me to,” Hannibal said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. “The forces that will allow us to travel through time and space are reliant on the pillars of sacrifice and sentiment. In my research, it has become clear that when rituals fail it is entirely the fault of a participant who did not understand that fully. As long as each of us present a strong enough sacrifice, in a place of strong enough sentimentality, we should even further break down the veil between realities.”

“And I can come to you,” Will said, though his mind was elsewhere, the word ‘sacrifice’ pressing hard into his mind. 

“Or I to you- though in terms of practicality I believe it would be wiser for you to come where I am. I have been preparing for your arrival.”

Will didn’t care much about that end of it- he had no preference and clearly Hannibal did, and even if Hannibal’s intentions were less than altruistic, Will couldn’t think of any reason to argue Hannibal come to him instead. He barely knew what was happening at all. He briefly considered what Hannibal ‘preparing for his arrival’ might consist of, and found himself mostly apprehensive about the idea. He found himself mostly apprehensive about all of it, except for the part where he and Hannibal were in the same place again.

“A sacrifice,” Will said. The word tasted wrong on his tongue. “Like Bedelia.”

Hannibal licked his lips at the mention of her, and Will felt heated by it. “Yes. Like Bedelia in both amount of blood spilt, and like Bedelia in how she played a vital role in our lives.”

Will scoffed a little, but Hannibal was correct, of course. There was baggage, with Bedelia. Will found himself hesitant to think of the other people in his life who filled that role- people who mattered enough to be a sacrifice- even as their faces began to race through his mind. He closed his eyes to it, helplessly, and when he opened them again, Hannibal looked introspective. 

“I will not tell you what to do, Will, but this kill must mean something to you beyond its concrete purpose. You understand that.”

“It needs to mean something in the abstract.” Will briefly considered asking Hannibal on who he was intending to kill, but found himself unable. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. 

“As for the place-”

“The house.” Will said, interrupting and feeling some sort of way at the piqued narrowing of Hannibal’s eyes. “The house on the cliff. Surely that’s sentimental enough.”

“It’s where you tried to kill us.” Hannibal’s voice was neutral, but if anything that was more disconcerting than the alternative. 

“I would think you would like it more, for that,” Will replied, aware he sounded combative but not being able to help it. Like Hannibal had any ground on that front. 

It took a moment of stone-faced contemplation, but finally Hannibal tilted his head in acquiescence. Will knew they would need to talk about that part of it, one day, but felt as if it would both be wrong and pointless to bring it up when they weren’t actually together in person, when they had limited time. 

There was more to the instructions than that, of course. Hannibal spent the majority of their precious hour explaining what he could of blood magic, and time travel, and rituals. Will listened to all of it carefully, not sure which parts of it he would need to know, but found himself wanting to interrupt and diverge the conservation to something less technical and more personal. Hannibal told Will briefly of his own failed attempts at reversing time, of times in his life where he had seen- briefly- into other worlds, of magical objects passed down to him from his aunt, the most remarkable of which was a teacup he had had with him in Baltimore which supposedly functioned the same way as the mirror, but with tears instead of blood. The most important details beside what they had decided together landed easily in Will’s memory- namely the time and date of their shared sacrifice, a planned four weeks into the future both to make sure they both could have the sacrifices ready for it, and so that Hannibal could continue to ‘prepare for Will’s arrival’, whatever the hell that meant. 

“I wish I could see you before then,” Will said, not particularly caring if he sounded needy.

Hannibal didn’t seem to care either. He had gone clinical in his explanation and instructions, but suddenly his eyes were bright with most pleasure and consideration. “I can’t promise anything,” he said, “but there may be a way. Some of my preparations require me to go to Italy. When I was a young man, I had what I could only consider a supernatural experience in a forest commonly regarded to be haunted. It was a mostly failed attempt at blood magic at the time, but with you participating as well, I imagine it would work as the mirror has.”

“What would we need to do?” Will asked, though he was already decided.

Hannibal gave him the exact name of the forest and had Will repeat it back to him twice. Then he said, “Think of my touch. Spill blood over the campfire. Not too much; just enough. The legend states that such actions cause ghosts to appear.”

“And that’s what happened to you, before? You saw a ghost?”

“I believed so at the time,” Hannibal said. “Now I wonder if it wasn’t a glimpse into another timeline, as you say.”

“Our time here is almost up. The mirror will shatter soon,” Will said, knowing it in a way he couldn’t articulate. “Can you feel it?”

“No,” Hannibal said honestly. “But I am unsurprised you can. There have been times, over the years, where I wondered if your ability to turn back time in order to reconstruct a crime scene was something more arcane than you knew.”

“Anyone can reconstruct a crime scene.” Will had never considered his processes a way to ‘turn back time’ before, but finding out that Hannibal did felt something like a revelation.

“Not like you can.”

Will found himself unsettled by the implication- it was a reminder of things he had been told when he was very young and his empathy was beginning to become recognizable as something other than an overly sensitive child. Older women taking one look at him and saying he was blessed, or cursed, dependent on their perspective. It had always upset his father, and therefore upset Will as well, and he hadn’t thought on it much- or at all with any seriousness- in years. 

“I felt what was done to Bedelia. What you did to her and what I did to her both. The same the first time I saw you, when I hurt my hand. Did that happen to you?”

“I see them, as if they were reality, but I do not feel them as it seems you do,” Hannibal said.

“Well, nothing new there.” Will brought his hand up to the mirror. He heard Hannibal exhale. 

“There will come a time where nothing will separate us,” Hannibal said, and he sounded so, so certain. Hannibal placed his hand on the mirror as well, and Will couldn’t tell if he was imagining the heat he felt from it. “Think of us, together, in Italy.”

“Bedelia once told me that the touch of others makes us who we are,” Will said, and couldn’t help the way his face heated when Hannibal smiled at the reminder of Bedelia. Of what they both had done to Bedelia. 

“Bedelia was correct on many fronts,” Hannibal said. 

Will hesitated and regretted it almost immediately. They didn’t have the time. “Was she correct when she told me you were in love with me?”

The pause before Hannibal responded was minuscule, but Will felt it like a weight. “It doesn’t serve anyone for you to ask questions you already know the answer to, Will.” His tone was restrained, almost annoyed. 

Will wanted to delight in it, revel in soft teasing and put-on sharp tones. He wanted to ruffle Hannibal’s hair and drag mud into the house and know the only retribution he would face would be a long-suffering sigh. He wanted to do things that would get anyone else killed. He wanted to release every desire he had decided before he was even an adult that he could never, ever tell anyone, especially a lover, and then have those desires matched in turn.

 _Lover_. Christ. The word had appeared in his thoughts unbeckoned but not unwelcome. Even ‘partner’ would have been less damning, but Will couldn’t find himself able to deny the truth of it.

Will felt his eyes burning, and hoped Hannibal was in the same state. He had never wanted to make anyone cry in the way he wanted to make Hannibal cry. He could hardly hear Hannibal’s voice when he finally spoke again. 

“I’ll see you soon, Will,” Hannibal said, and then, quicker than Will was even able to really see, the mirror shattered completely, degrading itself to fine shreds and falling to the ground at an unnatural pace. 

* * *

* * *

* * *

Hannibal did not look at the mirror once it shattered- its usefulness to him was gone. The birds would use its shards to build their nests, perhaps. 

Chiyoh came out of the barn. Based on her expression, Hannibal assumed she had heard most if not all of his and Will’s conversation. 

“What is the endgame, Hannibal?” She asked, a quiet fury simmering in her. 

“Will is an excessively burdened man,” Hannibal said. “If he were to know that we could return to our final moments on the cliff- even mid-fall...” Hesitation struck Hannibal, leaving him frustrated, as if he was learning a new language. “Will would be tempted to return to the life he had created for himself while I was in prison. I cannot allow that.”

“You cannot allow it. So you believe with certainty that he would?”

“It’s not like you,” Hannibal said, side-stepping the question, “to be offended on Will’s honor.”

“I am not offended,” Chiyoh said. “I am disappointed. And it is not Will’s honor that I find myself concerned with.”

Rage flared up in Hannibal like a sudden ignition. Between his own anger, and Chiyoh’s festering anger, just below the surface, Hannibal found himself thinking of a lighter being dropped into an oxygen tank. 

Chiyoh clearly saw it in his face. “I wonder in how many worlds,” she said, “I survive this moment.”

“This is not your plight, Chiyoh. Nor is it Will’s. I am offering him a gift. In this world, there will be no latent guilt about abandoning his ready built family, the FBI, common morality. He will come into a world which has already mourned him.” Even as Hannibal said it, it felt as if it was something he was explaining to Will. He could feel the coldness in Will’s expression, his posture, his voice, if he ever found out. He would never find out. 

Chiyoh just watched, unmoving. Hannibal considered how she would look, shattered on the ground next to the mirror. They biked back to town.

* * *

* * *

* * *

Will booked a series of flights to Baltimore through Italy, with the assistance of a credit card Chiyoh had given him. He had asked her the limit and she had stated that it meant nothing to her, making Will realize that it in some way was linked to Hannibal. The idea of spending a dead man’s money, even Hannibal’s, seemed almost eerie, and the feeling followed Will all the way to the airport a few days later. 

They were in business class, a decision Will hadn’t made consciously when buying the tickets but would later explain to himself as a perquisite toward Chiyoh, an explanation that didn’t even begin to ring as true. Chiyoh was probably the most austere person Will had ever met. 

They settled in their seats. Will handed her his bag of peanuts and said, drily, “This is me formally asking you not to push me out of another mode of transportation.”

Chiyoh looked at the plane window like she might actually have been considering it, but took the peanuts from him anyway. 

They hadn’t talked much since finding each other in Lithuania, though Chiyoh had accepted her role as Will’s companion until he passed over into the next plane rather easily. Will figured to her it was something like tying up loose ends on the long part of her life that was wrapped up with Hannibal’s. 

_However multi-faceted their relationship had been_ , Will thought, _it was probably a relief when she realized Hannibal was dead. And then I had to come and fuck everything up_. 

They had been up in the air for hours, both of them having turned down dinner, when Chiyoh spoke up.

“I never thought I would go to Italy, before you. I never thought I would go a lot of places I have been now.”

Will, hearing it said so plainly, realized he was thinking the exact same thing, except in regard to Hannibal and without the overhang of accusation that Chiyoh said it with. “I didn’t intend to bring you back into this,” he said, “if Hannibal hadn’t…” _If Hannibal hadn’t told me to_. Will suddenly realized it wasn’t much of an excuse. 

“You went back to Lithuania,” he said, instead. 

Chiyoh stayed staring out the window, the bag of peanuts still unopened in her hand. Will pictured her in a boat off the cliff house, finding Hannibal dead in the water and then immediately returning to the place where she had held prisoner and been held prisoner for so many years. 

“You shouldn’t go back to Lithuania, when I’m gone,” Will said, feeling immensely awkward, and also suffering a sense of deja vu he couldn’t place. “Christ. Never mind, you don’t need me telling you that. Just- Hannibal dying isn’t your fault. I know this can’t sound like much coming from me, but it’s an opportunity for you to finally do what you want.”

Chiyoh did not respond beyond a tightening of her fist around the bag of peanuts. Will suddenly wished she would push him out of the plane, just to put him out of his misery. 

Will thought they were done with, and was surprised when Chiyoh finally spoke up again, nearly twenty minutes later. They were an hour out from landing. 

“I only once saw Hannibal afraid of anything, when I was a child.” She said. “We were hiking up a mountain, and I was tired. He carried me up to the summit and we looked out at all the other mountains. I thought it was beautiful. When I looked up, and saw his face, he looked angry. Now, I realize that he had been scared.” 

“Afraid of heights?” Will couldn’t imagine this, even in a young version of Hannibal. 

“No,” Chiyoh said, “afraid of falling.”

 _Oh_ , Will thought. _Oh_.

* * *

Will and Chiyoh separated once they landed in Italy. What Chiyoh was doing, Will didn’t ask, and all she told him was the name of a hotel she had booked a room at. Will quickly found somewhere to buy camping gear, with a different credit card, and headed out into the supposedly haunted forest. It was the night before he and Hannibal were supposed to meet, but the idea of camping instead staying in a hotel appealed to him. 

He set up camp and slept fitfully, not having nightmares only because he was never truly asleep. The way timezones had worked out, it would be 5am in Italy when they were scheduled to meet, which Will found himself thankful for. When it was early enough to justify getting up, Will opened a can of baked beans to heat up on the hotplate for breakfast (the sporting goods store he had found hadn’t had a lot of food options, and Will had wanted to limit his time out in public, feeling antsy from the plane). He found some pleasure in the idea that Hannibal would flay him alive for choosing to eat a bowl of canned beans while in Italy, of all places, but mainly he just wished Hannibal had been there to take him to some swanky restaurant or bustling farmer’s market, to stuff him full of good food. The nature of the impulses weighed heavy on his mind as he watched the beans start to cook. 

Will had never been particularly keen to plan for the future- always too much going on in his head in the present to justify planning for something that might not ever happen. But he had started to find himself distracted with how much he was thinking about what would happen when he and Hannibal were in the same place again. To his surprise, it was the small details that seemed most insurmountable at the moment, and not the seemingly inevitable life of murder. Their relationship was so unlike anything Will had ever vaguely conceived. _Where are we going to live,_ he couldn’t help but think, _will we buy a house together? Surely Hannibal already has somewhere in mind. Are we going to share a bedroom?_

The thought occurred so naturally it took a moment before Will reacted to it fully. The idea of being physically intimately- _hell_ , Will thought honestly, _having sex with_ \- Hannibal had been introducing and reintroducing itself to Will’s brain since Will had realized Hannibal was still alive, somewhere. Will knew first hand how all-encompassing Hannibal was, especially in person. If they lived together… That, and having spent so much time meditating on moments when Hannibal had touched him, had seemingly erased any actual need for decision from Will’s mind.

The realization came quietly, barely a realization at all for how little it impacted Will. He had only ever considered himself heterosexual out of convenience, and not having any reason to think or act otherwise. In all the problems of being in a relationship with Hannibal Lecter, his being a man and contrasting orientations seemed to be last in a long list. And, if their last conversation had been anything to go off of, maybe their orientations weren’t so contrasting after all. 

But even if they did have sex- which unless Hannibal was opposed to it, and Will did not believe he would be, Will was finding it harder and harder to imagine they wouldn’t- that didn’t necessarily mean they would be sharing a bedroom. Hannibal would want space after having lived alone for so long, Will thought. The idea wasn’t appealing to Will in the least, and the more he thought about how he and Hannibal would go to separate rooms at the end of shared days, the more upsetting it seemed. But they wouldn’t be married, just because they were together.

Will watched the beans burn in the pan, and let them. He stared until the clock struck 5. _I’m a fucking idiot_ , he thought, and was struck by a degree of impatience he hadn’t felt since he was a child. He turned off the hot plate before leaving the tent and walking to the campfire. 

_Ready or not_ , he thought. He recalled with everything he had how it had felt when Hannibal stripped him of his clothes while he was in a drugged haze, in Florence, in Wolf Trap, and he used his pocket knife to open his palm over the fire. 

In all of Will’s limited experience with blood magic over the past weeks, what happened in the fire was the most obviously mystical thing he had seen. It felt like a hallucination- the campfire built up smoke at a rapid rate and then the smoke took shape in the form of a man. Will knew it was Hannibal through intuition rather than recognition. 

“I’m glad it worked,” Will said before anything else, before even really getting a good look at Hannibal. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

Hannibal seemed pleased at the confession. “I am glad as well.” He was made up entirely of smoke, the fine details of him fuzzy and staticky. Honestly, ghostlike. 

Not having anything pressing to discuss about how they would next meet, Will found himself feeling rather lost on what to say. It had been what he wanted- just a chance to have a conversation with Hannibal- back in Lithuania, but in the moment he was overwhelmed with the amount of choice he had. It had been a very long time since he had talked to Hannibal with any degree of casualness. “How are you?” Will asked, and was immediately embarrassed by its simplicity. 

Hannibal didn’t seem to think anything of it. “Good. It is a welcome respite to see you,” he said. “You didn’t sleep well.” It wasn’t a question. 

“No,” Will agreed, touching the back of his own neck, near self-conscious. It was difficult to fully look at Hannibal, smoky visage that he was. It made Will feel rather insane. 

“This bothers you,” Hannibal deduced easily. “I will attempt to make myself more corporeal.” Hannibal started to move and Will quickly understood what he meant- more blood meant a clearer image. 

“No,” Will started, “I wouldn’t want-” and then he realized. “Someone else is there. You’re spilling someone else’s blood.” 

“Yes,” Hannibal agreed easily, voice farther away. “He is fully unconscious however, and will be for hours. Near dead. We might as well be alone.”  
  
Will wanted to protest that that hadn’t been his concern, more out of principle than actual feeling, but then, something odd began to happen around him. It was not yet fully dawn but it suddenly grew even darker and before him the campfire had dimmed, but the smoke remained. Hannibal’s form remained mostly unclear, especially the features of his face, but he seemed, for the first time since all of this had started, to actually be in the same place as Will. 

“Better?” Hannibal asked. 

Will exhaled something like a laugh, mind wiped of any concern that wasn't Hannibal. “It looks like I could reach out and touch you.”

“You might be able to,” Hannibal agreed, and despite the rush he felt at the word, Will stayed where he was, for the time being. 

“What do you imagine it will be like, when we’re in the same place?” He asked instead, his earlier concerns about the future still weighing on his mind. 

“Euphoric,” Hannibal said immediately, “we will be able to continue the journey we had begun on the cliff. Whatever you wish Will, it will be yours.”

“Oh.” Will said, struck by the fervor of Hannibal’s words. “I meant more, what kind of house will we live in?”

Hannibal’s silence was long suffering and suffocatingly affectionate. “Oh,” he repeated back. He seemed introspective for a moment, like he was giving the question deadly serious consideration, but Will cut him off before he could respond. 

“Will we have sex?”

Hannibal’s reaction was a sustained silence followed by a long blink Will could make out even in the smoke. “If you want,” he said, agreeably. 

Will wanted to throw something at the shadowy figure of him, but didn’t want to embarrass himself further. Yet. “You can’t just say, ‘if you want’, like I asked you if we should go on a walk later.”

“If you’re asking me if I want to have sex with you, I would ask you not insult either of our intelligence by pretending you don’t know the answer to that. Similarly, if you are asking if I require sex in order to live in tandem with you, my greatest desire, I am almost offended that you have to ask.” Hannibal replied, “So, the answer to the question of if we will have sex, is ‘if you want’.”

Will felt both chastised and invigorated, and annoyingly, dangerously close to being turned on. He didn’t respond. _If you want to know_ , he thought, _you have to ask_.

“What moment did you think of in order to bring about our meeting?” Hannibal asked, searching for answers in a roundabout way that reminded Will of their therapy sessions. 

Will made the split second decision to be transparent. “I thought about you undressing me. Both times.”

For a short moment Hannibal seemed shocked by his prodding having such a clear answer. And then, as if Will had just presented him with a feast, the atmosphere around them turned eager and dark. “We will live in whatever kind of home you wish, wherever you wish. We will live as we were meant to- doing all things together.”

 _Fuck_ , Will thought.

“Like Jupiter coming to Io, hidden in shadows,” Hannibal said, seemingly mostly to himself, and then- “May I touch you Will?”

Will didn’t think Hannibal had ever asked him that before. “Yes. But I wish you _weren’t_ hidden in shadows.”

Hannibal hesitated for just a second. “Perhaps you should close your eyes. Use your brilliant imagination.”

The words were near-teasing and made Will shift where he was sitting on the soft ground in front of the campfire. It took a moment but he eventually did as Hannibal suggested, closing his eyes tight. 

He felt Hannibal’s hand on his shoulder, as steady and solid and lifelike as anything he had felt from another living creature. He couldn’t help his gasp.

“It feels,” Will said, “it feels as if you’re here.” 

“Good,” Hannibal murmured. “Very good. I was hoping you would say that.” Hannibal’s hand moved slowly, up from Will’s shoulder to his neck, then his face. Will found it so easy to imagine Hannibal in front of him, his expression like Will was something he had never quite seen before. “Why did you ask me if we will have sex, Will?”

Will had to laugh then- it was so blatant, almost fucking tawdry- but his laughter was caught in his throat when he suddenly felt Hannibal press his face into Will’s neck. Will felt as if he was in an inferno. “Because I want to,” Will said in response, quiet but firm. It felt almost like cheating, that it couldn’t possibly be that simple, that he could just _say_ that and the world wouldn’t fall apart.

It was hot- Will felt as if he was being broiled by just Hannibal’s close attention. Hannibal had slipped his hands up Will’s flannel, touching Will’s stomach and chest over his undershirt. Even with the fabric between them, his hands felt like a brand. 

Hannibal’s hands were so high up under Will’s flannel, it seemed best to just take it off. After a moment of consideration, Will took off his undershirt as well and vaguely gestured (as well as he could, with his eyes still closed) for Hannibal to do the same. Soon Will was lying on his side on the ground, Hannibal pressed up behind him, bare chest to his back. 

Hannibal touched him. It was slow and exploratory until it wasn’t, until Hannibal placed his teeth against Will’s shoulder and bit. 

Will moaned louder, unconscious to how legs spread in response. He felt bestial in regard to how natural it all felt, to how much he wasn’t caught up in his own head. He was hard, and felt Hannibal’s own hard cock behind him.

Hannibal was clutching at his thigh in response, pulling his leg back even further. Will felt like he was being split open. “Are you going to fuck me?” Will asked, barely thinking as he said it. 

“Yes,” Hannibal breathed out against the bite on his shoulder, “soon.”

At Hannibal’s encouragement, Will pressed back hard and repetitively- it was an unfamiliar movement, rubbing his ass against a hard cock. It felt good though, in the same way it always felt good for a woman to take his hand and pull it down to touch her, feeling hot wetness. It felt good to be wanted, and to be able to supply pleasure. It was almost embarrassing how delighted Will felt by Hannibal’s loud breath in his ear and his hard cock hidden by cloth rubbing against him and his hands running over Will’s body in a desperate, manic rush. There was no calculated, cold control. It made something deep inside Will burn. Will had been desired before, but never had he been desired like that, by someone like that.

Will reached his arm back to attempt to get Hannibal’s pants undone, impatient and fumbling. He was struck by how real the fabric felt in his hands, forgetting so easily that Hannibal had come out from the fire as a spectre. Hannibal took the hint and gently pushed Will’s hand away to undo his pants himself. Will attended to his own pants, having to pull his leg back from Hannibal’s grasp to undo them and then push them roughly down and kick them off away. His cock, mostly ignored up until that point, pressed against his stomach and it felt deliriously good to wrap a hand around himself. “Hannibal,” he said, half a moan and half a request, and he heard Hannibal grunt behind him as he pulled Will back against him again. 

He moaned again at the feeling of Hannibal’s bare cock against his ass and his lower back. Will gripped his own cock for a few moments before taking his hand away and reaching back to grasp Hannibal’s hair and tug hard once before letting his arm fall so that he was gripping Hannibal’s hip instead. “I want you to fuck me,” he said it like a revelation, knowing it wasn’t a possibility, not then, so he could get away with saying it without having to worry about the logistics. “Hannibal, I want you to _fuck_ me.”

“Will.” Hannibal’s voice was as strained as Will had ever heard it. 

Hannibal was touching him all over, starting from his knees to running up to graze over his cock and back down again. Briefly Will felt Hannibal’s hand over his stomach, hesitating for a split second before rushing up and pressing hard against his sternum. 

_He’s being so careful_ , Will thought. For Hannibal to show signs of doubt was disconcerting, and Will wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it. He covered Hannibal’s hand with his own and pulled it back down again, pressing against the scar on his stomach. 

“Feel,” Will said, and Hannibal’s breathing had nearly stopped. “It’s yours.”

Hannibal pressed his fingers into the length of the scar- it didn’t feel much like anything for Will, and probably never would again, sensation dimmed where the flesh was raised. Even so, it made Will’s cock throb. Hannibal pressed the flat of his hand against the scar, like he was still trying to stop the bleeding from that night.

“My love,” Hannibal said, his voice sounding wretched.

The word sent a shock through Will he could feel in his toes, and he turned his upper body so he could press his mouth against Hannibal’s, close-lipped and almost chaste. It was their first kiss. It was off-center, Will having kept his eyes closed, afraid that opening them to see that this wasn’t even real, that they were still in two different places, would ruin it.

“Yes,” Will said, a statement of agreeance and encouragement and pleasure all in one, “Hannibal, yes.”

They kissed properly then, falling into a pattern. Hannibal didn’t take his hand away from Will’s stomach, using it to keep Will steady so he could fuck harder against his backside. Will reached to hold on to Hannibal’s hip again, encouraging.

His eyes were still squeezed shut as Hannibal licked inside his mouth, bit his bottom lip hard. “Open your eyes, Will.” 

Will shook his head, and felt the pull on his lip as Hannibal bit down again. Will’s lips were so chapped it didn’t take much pressure for them to split, and Hannibal pressed his tongue to where it stung like he was trying to get inside. “No, no…” Will trailed off, a particularly rough thrust between his ass cheeks distracting him. 

“Will,” Hannibal argued with just his name.

“What do you see? Can you even see me?”

“I always see you,” Hannibal said, sounding almost put out. Then- “But yes. I see your flesh where our bodies touch. I see where I put my hands on you, and where you press yourself against me."

Will was still uncertain, turning his head away from Hannibal for a moment. He groaned loudly when he felt teeth bite into the nape of his neck. 

“Will, you need to look.” Hannibal finally took a hold of Will’s cock, simply holding and letting Will fuck forward into his fist while Will let Hannibal fuck against him in turn. “Look at me touch you, at the least.”

Will breathed in deeply before nodding. He opened his eyes to see Hannibal was telling the truth- he saw a hand around him, Hannibal’s hand around him. Beyond that, where the hand turned to wrist turned to arm it got blurrier- smokier. Will turned his head back again but kept his eyes lowered. It was a shock straight to his stomach to see Hannibal’s dick rubbing against him. He was hard and wet, which Will had known, but it was so obscene to actually see it that Will squeezed his eyes shut again out of impulse. He forced himself to blink open again. Most of Hannibal’s body, where he wasn’t touching Will, was smoke. Will was surprised it doesn’t hurt to inhale. 

“Wait,” Will said, suddenly. He wanted to look up, wanted to see Hannibal’s face, but was worried how he’d react if it was only smoke. “Hannibal, stop. Stop.”

Hannibal did, almost immediately, moving to pull away. 

Will grabbed at him, twisting almost all the way around. “No, don’t stop- not like that. Just, let me…” Will sat up, and Hannibal sat up with him, both of his arms falling around Will. It’s annoyingly good to be held, Will thought. 

Keeping his eyes closed, Will stood up on his knees, using his grip on Hannibal’s shoulders both as a way to help himself up and in order to keep Hannibal sitting. He felt unsteady, and let his head fall between his shoulders as he stood for a moment to catch his breath.

“Will?” Hannibal asked, keeping his hands to himself, his voice still rough from arousal but tinged with curiosity.

“Hold on,” Will said. After a few more seconds he moved to sit in Hannibal’s lap, straddling him and letting his arms slip around his neck. Their dicks brushed up against each other and Will made a deep noise in the back of his throat at the exact moment Hannibal let out a soft moan. Hannibal’s hands returned to Will’s body, petting over his ass and up his back.

Will touched Hannibal’s face, the sharp planes of his cheeks, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He could hold the image of Hannibal’s face in his head so vividly, had never been able to forget it even the years they’d been apart. He held Hannibal’s face in his hands and opened his eyes. 

Will felt nearly drunk, so close to the fire and wrapped up in Hannibal’s arms, and was shocked to find Hannibal’s expression exceedingly clear. He looked desperate, nearing anguished. “Oh,” Will said, and kissed him. 

They rutted against each other, only breaking from kissing so Will could get a good look at Hannibal’s face, still held tenderly in his hands. Hannibal had been telling the truth- Will could see his fully only where Will placed his hands on him. He decided he wouldn’t let go of Hannibal’s face. 

Will’s orgasm took him completely by surprise, and he cried out loud into the quiet of the forest, clutching onto Hannibal as Hannibal somehow pulled him even closer. It felt severe, almost punishingly so. Hannibal came soon after, Will getting to stare into his eyes as he did, feeling simultaneously validated and flayed by the intensity in his expression. It became too much, and Will kissed Hannibal’s hairline and pressed his face into his neck again, so he could close his eyes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i made a tumblr just for reblogging hannibal stuff- hannible.tumblr.com
> 
> i probably wont post a lot but if anyone ever wants to say hi or anything im there!


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